This award supports an integrated study to extend as existing record of decadal-to century-scale climate and ocean variability in the Caribbean/western Atlantic back 2000 years as recorded in the varved, high-deposition rate sediments of the Cariaco Basin, Venezuela. The Cariaco Basin sediment record represents one of the very few marine records, if not the only record, in the Atlantic which has the potential to provide continuous, near-annually dated records of tropical climate and ocean variability which span the last 2000 years. The sediments of the Cariaco Basin provide the opportunity to examine a variety of climate variables (e.g., trade wind intensity, ITCZ fluctuations, seasonal sea surface temperatures, etc.), and to explore how these variables interact and respond to external forcing mechanisms such as variations in the thermohaline circulation of the Atlantic and insolation changes on decadal to century time-scales. Paleoenvironmental time-series produced by this project will provide a critical regional data set for a large and poorly understood area of the tropical Atlantic that can be used to interpret current climate observations and to test and validate numerical models of global climate change.
