|
Satellite image of San Salvador Island |
|
REU Site: Field Research on Bahamian Lakes— Exploring Records of Anthropogenic and Climate Change |
|
The goal of our Bahamian Lakes REU site is to provide the opportunity for an interdisciplinary and international group of students and faculty to work together on the common research objective—deciphering the past environment from lake deposit records—from a sedimentary, geochemical, biological and archaeological point of view (using methods using grain size, LOI, XRF, ICP-MS, faunal and floral diversity analyses, and VOC). To do this, we have assembled an interdisciplinary team of faculty with expertise from a wide spectrum of disciplines including geology, geochemistry, biology, biogeochemistry, and archaeology in an integrative approach to answering questions on how the climate has changed, how humans have modified the landscape, and how landscape changes may have triggered other physical changes that are recorded in the lacustrine environment. With this REU, we hope to provide our students and faculty and our Bahamian team collaborators the opportunity to collect multi-proxy data from the modern subtropical lake systems and past records of environmental change from sedimentary cores recovered from lakes on the island of San Salvador. Furthermore, stratigraphic, biological and chemical records derived from archaeologically excavations will provide an unprecedented opportunity to decipher the footprint of human occupation on this island and how it may have impacted the physical and biological environments. All of these data can and will be used to build a deeper understanding of the history and nature of climatic and anthropogenic environmental change through time. |
|
Dr. Lisa E. Park Professor Environmental Scanning Electron Scanning Microscope Lab Department of Geology and Environmental Science University of Akron Akron, OH 44325-4101 USA |
|
Contact Information: |
