Dr. Justin Stroup – Assistant Professor SUNY Oswego
“Understanding the Little Ice Age from the perspective of the Tropics: insights from Quelccaya Ice Cap, Peru”
Quelccaya Ice Cap, located in southeastern Peru, is a valuable site for understanding late Holocene climate conditions. At this site, there is an annual resolution ice core record which extends back ~1800 years (e.g., Thompson et al., 2013) and a landscape that records many fluctuations in past ice cap size. Here, we present a detailed record of late Holocene QIC fluctuations using 10Be-dated moraines in the Qori Kalis valley along with a suite of proxy data from lake sediment cores to provide new paleoclimate information. These data sets allow for interpretations about the sensitivity of tropical glaciers to changes in climate. Comparison between past QIC extents and the ice core record of net accumulation demonstrates that temperature was a dominant control on glacial fluctuations during the late Holocene. Our work also provides information about late Holocene climate change (the “Little Ice Age”). It supports hypothesized climate mechanisms such as changes in solar irradiance and volcanism that would influence global cooling and suggests that during the late Holocene the tropics responded to climate changes rather than initiating them. This work highlights the value of using a suite of proxy data from lake sediment cores, linked with surficial deposits and ice core data from the same ice mass.
Prof. Stroup is an Assistant Professor at SUNY Oswego.