R. Varela & M. Hayes processing water samples aboard B/O Hermano Gines
Principal Investigators: Mary Scranton and Gordon Taylor
Funded by NSF & Fondo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnologia e Innovacion (FONACIT), Venezuela
Students Supported:
Ph.D.: Diane Greenfield, Jeanne Gulnick, Tung-Yuan Ho, Maria Iabichella-Armas, Xiaona Li, Xueju Lin, Agnieszka Podlaska, Elizabeth Suter
M.S.: Douglas Escribano, Meredith Hayes, Li Li, Mariela Lopez-Gasca, Dane Percy, Sara Cernadas Martin, Lan Thi Tong
B.S.: S. Felegy, M. Rizzo, R. Bell, J. Sprague, J. Shin, C. Kenkel, A. Larson, C. Blankenship, A. Mattis, E. Leonidou, J. Otto, E. Burgie, C. Bauer, J. Wong, M. Fung, J. Kalda, N. Mistry, M. Kinariwala, K. Kennedy, J. Hendry, T.-L. Moya, J. Kim, M. Ladds, A. Sneddon, N. Adrion
Project Description:The Cariaco Basin, located on the northern continental shelf of Venezuela, provides an unparalleled sediment record for paleoceanographic reconstructions of tropical climate over the past several million years, owing to its undisturbed, varved sediments and strong seasonal signals from upwelling. It also serves as an model end-member system for oxygen-deficient waters, which have been expanding globally in response to climate change. Here our group (Scranton, Taylor & students) is grappling with processes that control diagenesis of biogenic debris in a highly stratified, largely anoxic water column located on a coastal margin. Our studies focus on how the turnover of compounds and elements (C, N, S, Mn, Fe) and bacterial production vary across the O2/H2S interface and through time. Project has been ongoing continuously since 1995 and has revealed local responses to changing climatic forcing (e.g., figure below).
For more information see http://www.imars.usf.edu/CAR/ .
Additional research on the Cariaco Basin is conducted by Dr. David Black. For more information, please visit his page
