A View from the Interior---Tales of Ostracods, Blue Holes and the Origin of Six Pack Pond

For more than thirty years, faculty and students from the University of Akron have been traveling to San Salvador Island to swim in muddy lakes, machete their way through hot and buggy trails, and core inland ponds---all in the search for ostracods and the tails they can tell about lake salinity histories, climate change and the impact of hurricanes on the island. From these studies, depositional histories were reconstructed for Little Lake, Watling's Blue Hole, Pigeon Creek, Storr's Lake, Granny Lake, Oyster Pond, Six Pack Pond and Salt Pond---correlating marine, brackish and hypersaline events using ostracod assemblage zones and trace element geochemistry; and generating a more comprehensive view of post-Pleistocene climatic variability.

In addition, other Akron students and faculty have been involved in studies characterizing the stromatolites, oolites and paleosols on the island was well as the resistivity of the freshwater lenses. In all, twenty-one students from the University of Akron have completed Masters degrees from work on the island---a testament to the educational and research importance of the field station and a tribute to the work of Don and Kathy Gerace in establishing and maintaining a place from which this research could be conducted. The insights about saline lakes, particularly on a carbonate platform, as well as ostracod variability and paleoecological distribution have been numerous and invaluable and provides fertile ground for future research in these areas.