Late Holocene Sedimentary Archives of Tropical Cyclone Activity from the Northeastern Caribbean

由风暴潮和海浪引起的风暴诱发沉积物保存在沿海沉积环境中，可以提供严重风暴的记录。先前的研究表明，强烈的飓风袭击会产生一种独特的沉积特征，可以用来重建这些事件的长期记录。该提案的重点是重建来自加勒比海东北部的强烈飓风的沉积记录。波多黎各东部和美属维尔京群岛广阔的沿海池塘和泻湖在强烈飓风登陆期间很好地接收异质沉积物。这些通常低能量的环境以细粒有机沉积物为主，除了极端风暴期间海滩和近岸环境中偶尔沉积的粗粒矿物沉积物。从每个地点的一系列岩心中获得的沉积物可用于绘制风暴诱发沉积物的地图和日期。粗粒层频率的显著变化可能表明，气候变化调节了晚全新世期间东北加勒比地区飓风的发生。根据热带气旋活动的记录，研究热带气旋活动的频率与已知的气候振荡（如小冰期和中世纪暖期）以及气候变率指数（如ENSO和北大西洋涛动）之间的联系。

Storm-induced deposits resulting from storm surge and waves preserved within coastal sedimentary environments can provide a record of severe storms. Previous work has shown that intense hurricane strikes produce a distinctive sedimentary signature that can be used to reconstruct long-term records of these events. This proposal focuses on reconstructing sedimentary records of intense hurricanes from the northeastern Caribbean. Extensive coastal ponds and lagoons in eastern Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are well situated to receive allocthonous sediments during intense hurricane landfalls. These normally low-energy environments are dominated by fine-grained organic sediments, with the exception of episodic deposition of coarser-grained mineral sediments from the beach and near-shore environment during extreme storms. Sediment obtained from a series of cores from each site can be used to map and date storm-induced deposits. Significant variability in the frequency of the coarse-grained layers may indicate that changes in climate have modulated hurricane occurrence in the northeastern Caribbean during the late Holocene. With the resulting records of tropical cyclone activity, the links between the frequency of events and known climate oscillations such as the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period as well as indices of climate variability such as ENSO and the North Atlantic Oscillation will be explored.