This award supports a study designed to recover and analyze sediment cores spanning the last 12,000 years from lakes in southwestern Ecuador. The study has the potential to provide the first continuous, high-resolution record of large magnitude paleo-El Nino events from a region that historically has been one of the most sensitive land areas to the ENSO. These records will shed light on variations in the frequency of El Nino events through the Holocene and on the issue of the age of onset of the ENSO in the Nino 1 region. The ENSO time series derived from lakes in southern Ecuador will enable a comparison of the frequency of El Nino events in the Nino 1 zone with oceanic conditions that prevailed at various times across the tropical Pacific. Such a comparison would further the evaluation of several models that have been developed to determine the atmospheric and oceanographic factors that control the frequency and severity of El Nino events, including the future frequency and severity of ENSO in an enhanced greenhouse world.
