SGER: Long coring in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific to address key questions of tropical and global climate change

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This award will provide funds for the PI and two graduate students to join the R.V. Knorr during a transit leg from Hawaii to Panama in order to conduct approximately 5 days of piston coring in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific (EEP) using the newly developed long coring capability of the R.V. Knorr. In combination with multi-coring to recover intact Holocene sediments, the long coring capability will permit the PI to target high deposition rate settings in critical regions of the EEP to obtain sediment across four to five glacial-interglacial cycles in the heart of the cold tongue of the EEP for the first time. Cores will be logged by Multi Sensor Track (MST), and preliminary AMS radiocarbon dates will be collected on the cores to establish sedimentation rates and Late Quaternary age models. An open forum will be scheduled at the Fall 2008 AGU meeting in San Francisco to solicit input from the scientific community on the science coring plan. After collection, these cores will be made available to researchers interested in studying them without a moratorium period. The Broader Impacts include the participation of graduate students and the potential for international collaboration with colleagues from Peru and Ecuador. This research will provide material to study societally relevant climate issues such as El Nino and La Nina variability throughout Earth history.