Dr. Corliss is awarded funds to continue his research with Dr.Thunell (University of S.Carolina) in the investigation of the Quaternary paleoceanography of the Sulu and South China Seas. Sediment deposition in these two basins is controlled by intervening sills that greatly inhibit the exhange of bottom water. During a cruise in 1988 Drs. Corliss and Thunell collected transects of cores along these sills to document changing paleoceanographic conditions during glacial/interglacial cycles of the late Pleistocene. With their present award they will complete their core analyses and extend them to include studies of living benthic foraminifera collected in their box cores. The ecologic and isotopic information derived in this manner will be used to reconstruct the history of changes of the late Quaternary paleoenvironments of the region. Their data will also be used to reconstruct the late Quaternary history of monsoonal circulation of the western equatorial Pacific; they intend to compare this history with results derived from other studies of the NW Indian Ocean.
