Intellectual Merit: This research seeks to carry out a high-resolution multiproxy study of climate change over the last 2,000 year in Southern California in the Santa Barbara Basin. The research will improve the ability to predict the environmental response to global warming in Southern California and will help to understand how regional precipitation, extreme weather events and ocean circulation responded to past Holocene climate change in the area. High resolution paleoclimate data will be collected on sediment cores that span the Little Ice Age interval, Medieval Climate Anomaly, and the rapid warming in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Project objectives will be reconstruction of sea surface temperature shifts for the targeted intervals at ~10 year resolution. Reconstruction of the biogenic and lithologic sedimentary input into the basin with a 1-2 year resolution via scanning XRF will also be used to identify extreme weather events. Data from this time series will be compared with terrestrial paleoclimate records in terms of tree rings, pollen profiles, and archeological dates. Multiple box and Kasten cores will be sampled and analyzed for radiocarbon and varves to constrain ages. Multi-species planktonic foram Mg/Ca ratios and oxygen isotope analyses will illuminate sea surface temperatures. Census counts of forams, radiolarians, and diatoms will provide information on seasonal shifts in water column structure and bioproductivity. Results will allow ecosystem reconstructions and will inform us about the climate conditions and land/ocean responses in the last 2,000 years. Data will be also analyzed to try and find any periodicities associated with Pacific Decadal Oscillations (PDO) and El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO).
Broader Impacts: The regional effect of climate change on human resources is of significant societal importance under the present conditions of climate warming. This project will support two female PIs and advance the professional training of several graduate and undergraduate students. Efforts will be made to recruit students from groups under-represented in the sciences using established minority outreach engines. Results of the work will be broadly disseminated to the public over the Internet through the EarthGuide website, which will include related curriculum at the high school level.
