Presentation by Kelly McKeon.
Paleostorm frequency recorded in an Aleutian Island fjord
Sedimentary paleostorm records are important tools for the describing the relationship between storm variability and climate but have been primarily developed in tropical settings. In this study, we reconstruct storm activity from a new environment (a fjord) at a high latitude (Aleutian Islands) where no storm records currently exist. We first perform robust event-bed attribution to distinguish storm deposits from other coarse-grain depositional mechanisms including tsunamis, volcanoes, and rapid sea level changes. We then present an updated method for estimating continuous storm frequency from coarse-grained sedimentary deposits and putting error bars on individual paleostorm frequency timeseries. The error bars incorporate uncertainty related to randomness inherent to the storm process as well as uncertainty related to the age-modeling process required of all sediment core-based studies. Results highlight the importance of incorporating chronological uncertainty into error calculations and show that periods of high and low storm frequency are more uncertain than previously acknowledged. This study demonstrates the capability of fjords to record paleostorms, fills a spatial gap in the global paleostorm record, and offers a method for adding error bars to paleostorm frequency timeseries.
