USGS Scientists set out to unlock the mysteries of prehistoric droughts in the Caribbean

Lake Enriquillo is a large hypersaline lake in the western Dominican Republic near the border with Haiti. A group of scientists from the USGS St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center and the Florence Bascom Geoscience Center spent the past two weeks collecting sediment cores from the lake, for the purpose of reconstructing the rainfall history in Hispanola.

The team recovered 5 meters of sediment from the depocenter of the lake (making the new cores the longest cores reported from the lake, to date), and were able to target seven different coring sites within the lake. One of the primary objectives of this project is to reconstruct the frequency of Caribbean drought using paleoclimate proxies (e.g., the geochemistry of different sedimentary components in the cores), and to determine the controls on Caribbean hydroclimate during the Holocene. This is important, not only for resource management in the U.S. Caribbean (i.e., Puerto Rico & USVI), but also for understanding long-term variations in global-scale processes that impact precipitation patterns in the continental U.S. (e.g., El Niño South Oscillation and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation). The team was also about the collect sediment cores along a shoreward transect, which may enable them to expand the project to reconstruct paleo-shorelines (our knowledge of lake level changes is really limited to the satellite era), and event-driven deposition (tectonic and fluvial events).

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