A NEW RECORD OF EXTREME CLIMATE EVENTS USING AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH TO RECONSTRUCT FLOODS IN NORTHWEST FLORIDA

Recent flood, drought, and storm events have devastated enormous populations of people in the Gulf Coast region, demanding the need to better predict the timing and amplitude of abrupt climate extremes. In particular, riverine floods are an enormous threat to homes, businesses, and infrastructure in the northern Gulf of Mexico region. Reconstructing long flood histories extending beyond the instrumental record is essential to our understanding of the cause and timing of floods; however, flood reconstructions are complicated by erosion of the record within the flood plain and re-deposition of old sediment during flood events. Here we present data from a different type of flood reconstruction based upon the identification of flood deposits in a lake situated within the floodplain of the Choctawhatchee River in northwestern Florida. Our continuous record is based upon variations in x-ray fluorescence-derived sediment geochemistry, loss-on-ignition, and grain size throughout multiple cores from our study site. We identify several distinct beds that are indicative of flood deposits during the last several millennia.