Climate and environmental changes on the southwest of Amazon Basin over the last 2000 years documented by isotopic records in speleothems

• Grant number: 19/22711-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Effective date (Start): January 16, 2020
• Effective date (End): March 19, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Geosciences - Geology
• Principal Investigator: Francisco William da Cruz Junior
• Grantee: Marcela Eduarda Della Libera de Godoy
• Supervisor: R. Lawrence Edwards
• Host Institution: Instituto de Geociências (IGC). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Research place: University of Minnesota (U of M), United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 18/25020-8 - Climate and environmental changes on the southwest of Amazon Basin over the last 1800 years documented by isotopic records in speleothems, BP.MS

Abstract

Despite several recent studies have focused on the mechanisms and patterns of the climate over South America, mainly the South American Summer Monsoon (SASM) and its main feature, the South American Convergence Zone (SACZ), these features are not well documented for the last two millennia over the Amazon Basin. Reconstructing tropical hydroclimate history has been difficult over Amazon, one of Earth's major centers of deep atmospheric convection, largely because limestone karstic areas are rare in the Amazon Basin low-lands, thus most study sites are located on the periphery of the basin (most in the Peruvian Andes), and also interpretations can be complicated by sediment preservation, uncertainties in chronology, and topographical setting. Thus, the understanding of SAMS variability during the last millennia has been improved by studies involving ´18O and trace elements on speleothems. Therefore, the current research plan has the goal to study paleoclimatic changes during late Holocene (~2 thousand years) over Southwest Amazon Basin, based on these high-resolution proxies, which can only be achieved by several precise dated speleothems by the U/Th method. (AU)