Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology Commons^™

Fluvial Deposition, El Nino And Landscape Construction In Northern Coastal Peru, Paul M. Pluta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The El Nino global climate anomaly is a major cause of weather variation that can have far-reaching effects on human populations around the world. Northern coastal Peru is an area of historically major impacts where strong El Nino events have resulted in catastrophic flooding and mass wasting, leading to significant social disruption. There is a growing body of literature on the prehistoric chronology of El Nino and how it affected human populations of the past, but more work is needed. In order to address the timing and characteristics of past El Nino events I investigated the alluvial sedimentary sequences at …

Reconstructing Late Holocene Hydrographic Variability Of The Gulf Of Maine, Nina Millicent Whitney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I present an annually resolved reconstruction of seawater temperatures in the

western North Atlantic from 1695-1915. This paleoclimate record was constructed

using oxygen isotopes measured in precisely dated Arctica islandica shells collected

off of Seguin Island in the western Gulf of Maine. The temperature reconstruction

was derived from this oxygen isotope time series using a modern d¹⁸O_w-salinity

mixing line developed for coastal waters in the Gulf of Maine from water samples

collected over the last decade. The d¹⁸O_w and salinity composition of these water

samples indicate that coastal surface waters consist of a …