Lacustrine Records of Late Quaternary Water Balance Fluctuations in the Venezuelan Andes: Assessing the Interplay of Insolation and Ocean Circulation as Paleoclimate Controls in the Tropics
This award supports a project designed to produce new multi-proxy high resolution paleoclimate records from the Venezuelan Andes and to test hypotheses concerning the causes of shifts in the precipitation-evaporation (P-E) balance from 18 ka B.P. to the present. Previous work provides only a broad paleoclimatic picture for this period: prolonged and intense aridity from the Last Glacial Maximum to the glacial-interglacial transition, and a complicated history of water balance shifts throughout the Holocene. The proposed research has three key goals:
(i) The produce well-dated records of several climatically-sensitive proxies at century-scale resolution, in order to identify regional patterns of P-E balance from 18ka to present; (ii) To identify higher frequency hydrological fluctuations over the past 2000 years, using more detailed analyses of the same proxies at higher resolutions (multidecadal or better) and ; (iii) To compare these results with findings from ongoing research on montane lake records in the Southern Hemisphere (Bolivian Andes).
This work will reconstruct the climate history of the region by applying an integrated methodology that combines seismic survey, sedimentology and sediment magnetic characteristics, elemental and isotopic geochemistry, diatoms, and pollen
