Preliminary Results of a Modern Watershed Study from Lake Junín, Peru: Biomarker Assemblages in Terrestrial and Aquatic Plants and Surface Sediments
Abstract
Lake Junín is a large, evaporatively-enriched lake in the central Peruvian Andes that is ideally situated to record variability in the South American Summer Monsoon, and sediment cores recovered by the Lake Junín Deep Drilling Project in 2015 span several glacial/interglacial cycles. Compound-specific stable hydrogen isotopes from leaf waxes offer the potential to reconstruct changes in monsoon strength and evapotranspiration for the entire sediment record, and can be compared with the carbonate-derived oxygen isotope record that is preserved only during interglacials. To characterize the modern proxy system, leaf samples were collected from terrestrial and aquatic species that are representative of the vegetation in the watershed. The compound distributions, concentrations, and D/H ratios of n-alkanes and n-alkanoic acids from plants and surface sediments were analyzed to develop site-specific calibrations of both terrestrial and aquatic isotopic signals, for application to downcore biomarker analyses.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFMPP43B2320W
- Keywords:
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- 1616 Climate variability;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1631 Land/atmosphere interactions;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1637 Regional climate change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1694 Instruments and techniques;
- GLOBAL CHANGE