Receipt of an award from the NSF will expand on-going research, in collaboration with Professor Bahadur Kotlia (Geology, Kumaun University) and Dr. Alex Cherkinsky (Center for Applied Isotope Analysis, UGA) on how the Indian Summer Monsoon has varied over recent millennia. This project will utilize the biological, chemical, and physical properties of lake sediment cores recovered in the Himalaya of northern India to determine if precipitation is correlated with summer temperature in this region during the early Holocene and if the widespread abandonment of Bronze Age settlements in the Indus River valley corresponds to a short-lived interval of extreme aridity during the mid-Holocene. An award from the Western National Parks Association will support continued collaborative research by faculty and students at UGA, OSU and Sinclair College on late Holocene hydroclimate variability and fire history in Great Basin National Park. Dr. Jiaying Wu’s 2019 paper in Quaternary Science Reviews, entitled “Late Holocene hydroclimate variability in Costa Rica: Signature of the Terminal Classic Drought and the Medieval Climate Anomaly in the northern tropical Americas”, was awarded the 2020 Ellen Mosley Thompson Award for the Best Paper in Long-term Environmental Change by the Paleoenvironmental Change Specialty Group of the AAG. An effort led by Emily Sambuco and Bryan Mark (OSU) has resulted in the publication of dataset in Frontiers in Earth Science describing variations in near-surface air temperature and relative humidity in Great Basin National Park on daily, monthly and seasonal timescales for the interval between 2006 and 2018. One of the key findings of this study is that the trend in daily maximum temperatures above 3500 m was significantly greater than the trend at lower elevations, providing support for the existence of elevation dependent warming in the central Great Basin. A large synthesis project led by Darrell Kaufman (NAU), which facilitated the development of comprehensive global database of Holocene paleotemperature records, was published in Nature Scientific Data. This database will provide the means to reconstruct Holocene temperature variations across space and time and in doing so, will be useful in improving our understanding of evolution of ocean-atmosphere circulation during the Holocene.
