ALBERT

All Library Books, journals and Electronic Records Telegrafenberg

Your email was sent successfully. Check your inbox.

An error occurred while sending the email. Please try again.

Proceed reservation?

Export
  • 1
    Publication Date: 2022-05-25
    Description: © The Author(s), 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Scientific Reports 6 (2016): 21728, doi:10.1038/srep21728
    Description: Most Atlantic hurricanes form in the Main Development Region between 9°N to 20°N along the northern edge of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). Previous research has suggested that meridional shifts in the ITCZ position on geologic timescales can modulate hurricane activity, but continuous and long-term storm records are needed from multiple sites to assess this hypothesis. Here we present a 3000 year record of intense hurricane strikes in the northern Bahamas (Abaco Island) based on overwash deposits in a coastal sinkhole, which indicates that the ITCZ has likely helped modulate intense hurricane strikes on the western North Atlantic margin on millennial to centennial-scales. The new reconstruction closely matches a previous reconstruction from Puerto Rico, and documents a period of elevated intense hurricane activity on the western North Atlantic margin from 2500 to 1000 years ago when paleo precipitation proxies suggest that the ITCZ occupied a more northern position. Considering that anthropogenic warming is predicted to be focused in the northern hemisphere in the coming century, these results provide a prehistoric analog that an attendant northern ITCZ shift in the future may again return the western North Atlantic margin to an active hurricane interval.
    Description: This research was supported by NSF Awards: OCE-1519578, OCE-1356708, BCS-1118340.
    Keywords: Climate-change impacts ; Forest ecology ; Ocean sciences ; Palaeoclimate
    Repository Name: Woods Hole Open Access Server
    Type: Article
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 2
    Publication Date: 2022-05-26
    Description: © The Author(s), 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Scientific Reports 6 (2016): 29587, doi:10.1038/srep29587.
    Description: Interactions between climate, fire and CO2 are believed to play a crucial role in controlling the distributions of tropical woodlands and savannas, but our understanding of these processes is limited by the paucity of data from undisturbed tropical ecosystems. Here we use a 28,000-year integrated record of vegetation, climate and fire from West Africa to examine the role of these interactions on tropical ecosystem stability. We find that increased aridity between 28–15 kyr B.P. led to the widespread expansion of tropical grasslands, but that frequent fires and low CO2 played a crucial role in stabilizing these ecosystems, even as humidity changed. This resulted in an unstable ecosystem state, which transitioned abruptly from grassland to woodlands as gradual changes in CO2 and fire shifted the balance in favor of woody plants. Since then, high atmospheric CO2 has stabilized tropical forests by promoting woody plant growth, despite increased aridity. Our results indicate that the interactions between climate, CO2 and fire can make tropical ecosystems more resilient to change, but that these systems are dynamically unstable and potentially susceptible to abrupt shifts between woodland and grassland dominated states in the future.
    Description: This work was supported by NSF grants EAR0601998, EAR0602355, AGS0402010, ATM0401908, ATM0214525, ATM0096232 and AGS1243125 and a Chevron Centennial Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin awarded to T.M.S.
    Keywords: Climate-change ecology ; Palaeoclimate
    Repository Name: Woods Hole Open Access Server
    Type: Article
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
Close ⊗
This website uses cookies and the analysis tool Matomo. More information can be found here...