CARIACO
Carbon Retention in a Colored Ocean

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. 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 and bacterial production vary across the O₂/H₂S interface (Ho et al. 2002).

Page last modified on Tuesday, December 7, 2004 by George E. Carroll