A major goal of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) is to better understand environmental change over a range of time scales.Along with a diverse group of international scientists, we are proposing to use the high-resolution Quaternary continental margin sediment record from southern Alaska to examine the ties between tectonically driven orogenic processes, glacial processes, and north Pacific oceanographic-atmospheric coupling.Late Quaternary sediment accumulation rates have been exceptionally high (10 m/ka), creating strata with temporal resolution of 1-15 years, sufficient to document the environmental changes occurring over time scales of several decades (e.g., Pacific decadal climate oscillation; PDO), as well as millennial-scale Holocene climate shifts (e.g., Hypsithermal and Neoglacial periods).Our major goals are to establish how the north Pacific climate has varied over the Holocene and at what time scales, and to determine if Holocene climate signals from this region in phase with other north Pacific and northern latitude locations.Such information is critical in understanding the migration of cultures and people across Beringia during the Last Glacial Maximum as well as North American climate.
Whereas the
initiation of research under IODP is several years away, we are in the
initial stages of determining the appropriate proxy records of Holocene
climate change in Gulf of Alaska sediments.Major
environmental and ecological regime shifts across the North Pacific Ocean
and Bering Sea occurred during the 20th Century and
can berelated to the PDO.In
the Gulf of Alaska region, the PDO index is positivelycorrelated
with air temperatures at numerous
coastal stationsand freshwater
discharge into the Gulf.Using archived
piston cores and potential new piston cores, I
am looking for a student to evaluate the creation of sedimentary
proxy records of the ecological shifts (e.g., microfossils) and climatic
controls (e.g., temperature, freshwater discharge) resulting from the PDO.Establishment
of these proxy records will be critical in the evaluation of the longer
Late-Pleistocene/Holocene records of climate change in this region.