In this project, we are attempting to determine the nature and cause of long-term climatic variations from the sediment record of lakes on several islands of the world.  Lakes on islands have the potential for yielding tremendous insight into long-term, global climatic variability. They offer the possibility of understanding long-term climatic variations by comparing two types of paleoclimate records – the record of oceanic conditions and the record of atmospheric conditions – in one geographic region. The sediments of island lakes record pure atmospheric responses to pure oceanic forcings. Atmospheric records from these lake sediments can be compared with sea-surface temperature records from nearby marine sediments to help us understand exactly how the atmosphere responded to a specific oceanic forcing at a specific time in the past.

Amy Caulder-Church M.S., December 2003

Caulder, A. N., Rigsby, C. A., Baker, P. A., Bjorck, S. and Fritz, S. L., 2001, Lacustrine sediments of Grenada -- toward a record of Holocene precipitation variability in the northern equatorial Atlantic [abst.]: Geological Society of American Abstracts with Programs, v. 34, no. 6.