THE USE OF SEDIMENTARY ANALYSIS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF A TIMELINE OF PAST ENVIRONMENTS IN TRIANGLE POND, SAN SALVADOR ISLAND, BAHAMAS

Triangle Pond is an interdunal lake located on the northwestern side of San Salvador Island, the Bahamas. A total of ten soft sediment cores have been extracted from the lake, five located in transects in the deepest part of the basin while the other five were removed from the interior side of the dune along what is the hypothesized past tidal inlet. Through the use of standard paleolimnological techniques including loss on ignition, sediment analysis, macro and microfossil identification and elemental analysis a total of six separate depositional environments have been identified. Radiocarbon dating on two of the cores has allowed for a hanging chronology of the past environments of Triangle Pond from its inception as a back-dune terrestrial influenced mud flat 3,400 years ago to its present condition of a hypersaline to brackish algal dominated lake. Furthermore, the archaeological data from the two prehistoric Lucayan sites along its shores (Minnis-Ward and Palmetto Grove) and the historical record from the three Loyalist plantations in close proximity have allowed for correlation between the environment of the lake and the anthropogenic activity on land. The sedimentary record shows that Triangle Pond has been affected by climatic, terrestrial, and anthropogenic activity through its environmental history, and that one catastrophic event altered the environment dramatically.