Initiating a New Collaboration between East Carolina University and Universiti Malaysia Terengganu: Post-Glacial Variations in the East Asian Monsoon Grant uri icon

abstract

  • Funds are requested to initiate a new research/education collaboration between East Carolina University (ECU) and Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (UMT) involving early career ECU faculty members and undergraduate and graduate students. The Institute of Oceanography at UMT has recently defined a new vision around the central issue of climate change and has a new ocean-going research vessel, the RV ?Discovery?. ECU faculty have a unique opportunity to 1) define specific collaborative research and graduate education goals at a planning workshop at UMT and to finalize logistics for the first of those goals, 2) collect initial data from the RV ?Discovery? to address that goal, and 3) continue the ECU-UMT collaboration with a follow-on NSF proposal. The goal we have identified to commence the collaboration is to test the hypothesis that post-glacial variations in the strength of the East Asian Monsoon can be recognized in cores from one of several isolated basins on the Sunda Shelf. We consider it geologically reasonable to anticipate that this basin is similar to the Santa Barbara and Cariaco basins in having an oxygen-depleted sedimentary record. If this is the case, then the resulting reduced bioturbation would better preserve climatic signals, such as variations of the strength of the monsoon. If our hypothesis is supported, then Sunda Shelf basins could prove to be important sites for many kinds of high-resolution Holocene paleoclimate studies in SE Asia. The initial data collection will involve a chirp seismic survey to map sub-seafloor strata and to use these data to select three coring sites in the target basin. We will then focus analysis on a single core to acquire data to underpin a follow-on NSF proposal.

date/time interval

  • January 2012 - December 2015