RYDL 2024

RYDL 2024

The goal of this cruise is to obtain ancient soils from Goleta Slough and San Dieguito Lagoon to reconstruct Younger Dryas landscapes offshore Southern California. The Younger Dryas was a period of abrupt climate change (a return to near-glacial levels when the globe had been warming) with relatively stable sea levels for ~1000 years followed by a rapid increase in warming and sea level rise. The effect of this period on the coastal climate and landscape of Southern California is not well understood, but if we can study this effect, we may be able to learn something about how to adapt to the warming and sea level rise we see today. Ancient soils can hold a wealth of information about past climate conditions. We will collect sediment cores from two mapped offshore paleochannels: Goleta Slough and San Dieguito Lagoon. Previously collected co-located sediment cores and sub-bottom profiles offshore San Dieguito Lagoon allowed identification of the ancient shoreline from the Younger Dryas period along with broad reconstruction of the associated landscape. We identified areas in the sub-bottom profiles offshore San Dieguito that could contain ancient soils from the Younger Dryas period. The plan is to obtain cores core in these promising locations. We previously conducted a sub-bottom survey of the offshore portion of Goleta Slough, which had more complete survey coverage than the San Dieguito survey; However we did not obtain any sediment samples. We will return to Goleta Slough to take sediment samples to reconstruct the landscape and climate there as we have been doing for San Dieguito. The Goleta Slough survey lines display several promising locations for ancient sediments that could preserve climate information. By returning to both of these areas and taking sediment samples, we will be able to study climate conditions on coastal Southern California during the Younger Dryas with much greater detail than has been done before.