RECENT PALEOCLIMATE RECORD FROM THE PALMER DEEP, WESTERN ANTARCTIC PENINSULA

Marine sediment cores from the Palmer Deep, located on the western Antarctic Peninsula shelf, have permitted extremely high-resolution reconstruction of the transition from the last glacial period to the Holocene as well as the century- to millennial-scale climate variability that characterizes the Holocene. These data have been instrumental in identifying the processes that drove the last deglaciation and the role of climate forcings over the past 13,000 years. During cruise LMG13-11, a 4.4 meter jumbo kasten core was recovered from the Palmer Deep (64°51.731S, 64°12.545W, 1031 m water depth), with the goal of evaluating the most recent climate record, building upon records that were derived from cores collected almost two decades earlier. The record from this new core enables us to address the proxy record of recent rapid regional warming of the Peninsula, a location where atmospheric temperature has increased at a rate five times the global average, and significant changes have been observed in the oceanic ecosystem. Chronologic constraints are provided by Pb-210 activity profiles. Proxy diatom data, analyzed at 2 cm intervals in the upper 50 cm of the core, record approximately the past 250 years, and document oceanographic change over this time period.