SGER: A History of Paleo-Hurricane Activity Recorded in the Stable Isotope Composition of Coral Skeleton

这项提议描述了一种新的想法和一种新的技术来识别地质记录中强烈的、正在登陆的飓风。它是基于这样一个事实，即飓风产生大量降雨，其氧同位素组成与正常夏季降雨截然不同。飓风降雨与湖泊、河流和溪流、地下水和海面的水在同位素上也是不同的。因此，它包含一个天然的同位素尖峰，很可能被合并到水生生物的碳酸钙骨架中。尽管海水中的同位素尖峰将通过混合和稀释迅速消散，但如果将其加入骨骼碳酸盐中，它将作为每次飓风经过的记录保存几个世纪甚至数千年。我们预测，居住在加勒比海和墨西哥湾浅水礁的巨大、长寿的珊瑚的CaCO2骨架含有这种同位素峰值，因此保存了过去几个世纪里使美国登陆的许多飓风的记录。我们将通过测量多米尼加共和国珊瑚的同位素组成来验证这一预测，多米尼加共和国是一个在过去几十年里遭受过几次强烈飓风袭击的岛屿。

This proposal describes a novel idea and a new technique to identify intense, landfalling hurricanes in the geologic record. It is based on the fact that hurricanes produce a large amount of rainfall with a very different oxygen isotope composition from that of normal summer rainfall. Hurricane rainfall is also isotopically distinct from water in lakes, rivers and streams, groundwater and the sea surface. It therefore comprises a natural isotope spike which is likely to be incorporated into the calcium carbonate skeletons of aquatic organisms. Although the isotope spike in seawater will quickly dissipate through mixing and dilution, if incorporated into skeletal carbonate it will remain preserved for centuries or even millennia as a record of each hurricanes' passage. We predict that the CaCO2 skeletons of massive, long-lived corals inhabiting shallow reef in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico contain this isotope spike and therefore preserve a record of many of the hurricanes which have made U.S. landfall over the past several centuries. We will test this prediction by measuring the isotope composition of corals from the Dominican Republic, an island hit by several intense hurricanes over the past few decades.