Hinrichs Lab - Indian Monsoon

Mi­cro­meter-scale bio­marker and ele­mental ima­ging on sed­i­ments from the north­east­ern Ar­a­bian Sea – re­con­struc­tion of the In­dian mon­soon evol­u­tion on a sub-decadal scale in the Holo­cene and the Bølling-Al­lerød in­ter­sta­dial

Summary

The In­dian mon­soon is one of the most im­port­ant large-scale coupled land-ocean-at­mo­sphere phe­nom­ena in the low lat­it­udes. However, the for­cing mech­an­isms of the decadal-scale mon­soon vari­ab­il­ity are not well un­der­stood be­cause know­ledge of short-term cli­mate os­cil­la­tions is mostly lim­ited to peri­ods covered by in­stru­mental re­cords. Un­der­stand­ing of the short-scale cli­mate evol­u­tion in the more dis­tant past is hampered by the small num­ber of re­cords that pre­serve un­dis­turbed sig­nals and by meth­od­o­lo­gical lim­it­a­tions to ob­tain highly re­solved re­cords. However, re­cent de­vel­op­ments that in­ter­rog­ate lam­in­ated sed­i­ments with novel ima­ging tech­niques showed great po­ten­tial to over­come these lim­it­a­tions.

In or­der to re­veal sub­decadal-scale pa­leo­cli­mate evol­u­tion of the trop­ics, I will ap­ply bio­marker and ele­mental ima­ging on finely lam­in­ated sed­i­ment sec­tions from the Ar­a­bian Sea span­ning the ma­jor part of Holo­cene (from 11.7-2 ka) and Bølling-Al­lerød in­ter­sta­dial (B-A; 14.7-12.9 ka). The goal of this pro­ject is to ex­plore the in­ter­play of the In­ter­trop­ical Con­ver­gence Zone (ITCZ), In­dian mon­soon in­tens­ity and re­lated en­vir­on­mental re­sponses on the sub­decadal and decadal-scale dur­ing the Holo­cene and B-A.