Project Description: At the start of my graduate student career, I spent a year in Peru on a Fulbright fellowship. One outcome of my research was a hypothesis that Peruvian beach ridges were the result of massive sediment pulses driven by El Nino rainfall and flooding, rather than the result of sequential uplift as had been postulated by others. The most recent ridge is near the shore, and ridges get older as one moves inland. To eliminate the uplift hypothesis, I needed to show that the ridges didn't rise sequentially inland. The GIAR award allowed me to hire a professional topographer to work with me to create a precision profile across the ridges. The results showed that the ridges did not rise sequentially from shore to interior. This, in turn, helped support my El Nino origin hypothesis. How did the grant process or the project itself influence you as a scientist/researcher? The GIAR-supported work led to a paper in the inaugural issue of the journal Geoarchaeology and helped launch one of my main streams of research, on the prehistory of El Nino. My colleagues and I have published on this topic in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Geology, and elsewhere.
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