The project involves a field program to take drill cores on the flank of Barbados in order to recover coral samples deposited during the most recent rise of sealevel. The coral species to be used in the study only grows within 5 meters of sealevel. By accurately determining the age of the coral recovered and the depth where it is found, a sealevel curve for the last 15,000 years will be constructed. This sealevel curve will be the first accurate curve of the most recent sealevel rise which has been estimated to be from 75 to 160 meters since the last ice age. The results will applied to a long-standing problem in paleoceanography: how to separate ice volume (sealevel) from temperature on the oxygen isotope signal in deep sea cores. Once the magnitude and timing of the sealevel rise is solved, the temperature signal may be extracted from isotope records.
