This award supports a study designed to evaluate the occurrence of deglacial Younger Dryas-style climatic events and high frequency oceanographic variability throughout the late Pleistocene in the Sulu Sea of the Indonesian tropics. The Younger Dryas is an abrupt and rapid climatic event which occurred between 11,000 and 10,000 14C years ago and had been primarily identified in paleoclimatic data from Europe and the North Atlantic high latitudes. This study will test the hypothesis that other Younger Dryas-style events and millennial-scale climatic variability occurred during other deglaciations in the late Pleistocene. To accomplish this a new detailed sampling scheme covering the last 750,000 years will be used in combination with the oxygen isotope stratigraphic framework already developed. The high-resolution paleoclimatic records resulting from this study will provide valuable insight into millennial-scale variability and the origin and regularity of abrupt climatic events in this strongly monsoonal region of the western tropical Pacific.
