Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology Lab
School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences,
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook University
Caribbean precipitation over the last millennia (current research):
Understanding the relative roles played by the Pacific versus the Atlantic on climate variability and the hydrologic cycle is of great importance to predicting future climate change scenarios. As part of a collaborative project with colleagues at the University of Puerto Rico and Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory , we will characterize Caribbean hydrologic variability spanning the last millennium using a network of speleothems from Puerto Rico, Guatamala, and Cuba in conjunction with Cariaco Basin data. The Caribbean is strategically placed between the two major ocean basins to act as a window into their respective climate forcing. As part of the North Atlantic climate system, and neighboring closely to the tropical Pacific, the Caribbean basin is particularly sensitive to processes derived from both large oceans.
We have chosen sites that contain records of annual or near-annual fidelity: three speleothem locations from the northern, eastern, and western Caribbean in conjunction with sediments from the Cariaco Basin provide spatial coverage of most of the Caribbean. Selected speleothems collected from these locations either have, or will be, extensively age dated by U/Th. The Cariaco Basin records of interest have robust chronologies, and will thus allow us to construct an unsurpassed matrix of past hydrologic variability. We will synthesize our records with other histories of circum-Caribbean precipitation and SST variability, as well as SST reconstructions from the tropical Pacific and tropical/high-latitude North Atlantic. Finally, we will incorporate this data into models that will be used to infer relative influences of the tropical Pacific and Atlantic on Caribbean hydrology.
We have chosen sites that contain records of annual or near-
Speleothems from Perdida Cave, Puerto Rico (left) and the Chiquibul cave system in
Guatamala-
Correlation between median monthly rainfall and average monthly d18O for Puerto Rico (left) and Guatamala (right).
