Lake-sediment records from tropical regions covering a complete glacial-interglacial cycle
are a particularly important complement to polar ice-core records, because they can
resolve long-standing questions about the relative importance of tropical and highlatitude
climate processes in translating external climate forcing into patterns of regional
climate variability. In coming years I plan to recover and analyze a ~150,000-year lakesediment sequence from easternmost Africa adjacent to the Indian Ocean, which is likely
to reveal a unique record of equatorial climate history in a region little impacted by
signatures of northern hemisphere glaciation being teleconnected to lower latitudes by
changes in Atlantic thermohaline circulation. To support all of my group’s research on
lake-sediment cores, but specifically to manage the logging and exploratory analysis of
the 300+ meter of cores generated by this project, I wish to equip my laboratory with
GEOTEK Multi-Sensor Core Logger (MSCL) instrumentation. This will allow rapid quality
screening, non-destructive analyses of sediment-composition parameters, and crosscorrelation of overlapping core sections to yield a composite master sequence of the
sediment profile. This funding application concerns the MSCL track with conveyor belt and
computer-guided stepper motor which autonomously pushes sediment cores past the
sensors at fixed depth intervals.