On 3 July 2024, Hurricane Beryl’s eyewall scraped Jamaica’s south coast as a Category 4 storm, dumping a rare, measurable signature into three sediment basins that scientists can now read like a storm diary. Climate models cannot reliably predict future Atlantic hurricane activity because the weather records feeding them are too short—only decades long—to capture natural storm cycles that play out over centuries. Jamaica sits in the main development region for Atlantic hurricanes and holds both written histories and layered lake and lagoon sediments that record past landfalls. But those sedimentary records need a known modern storm to calibrate them. Beryl provides that benchmark. By sampling water, live ostracod shells, and short sediment cores from Grape Tree Pond, Manatee Bay Lagoon, and Wallywash Great Pond, the team will match Beryl’s geochemical and sedimentological fingerprint against older storm layers. Success will let them reconstruct how often major hurricanes have struck Jamaica over hundreds of years, and feed those return periods into climate models. The results will directly inform Jamaica’s Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management and other agencies planning for future storms.
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Uncertainties in climate model projections of 21st Century Atlantic tropical cyclone activity hinder countries' plans to mitigate the economic and socio-cultural impacts of future storms. Projections of tropical cyclone activity are uncertain because the meteorological records used to inform the models are too short to capture the long-term natural variability of storms. Consequently, natural archives of tropical cyclone activity, such as coastal lagoon and lake sediments, are needed to detect storm activity over longer timescales. Jamaica is located within the Main Development Region of Atlantic hurricane activity and has a rich history of landfalling tropical cyclones recorded in documentary and sedimentary archives. We seek urgent funding to document the sedimentological and geochemical signatures left behind in the Jamaican landscape by Hurricane Beryl, whose eyewall skirted the southern coastline of Jamaica on the 3rd July 2024 as a Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 225km/hour, generating a dangerous storm surge of up to 3.7m. The storm impacted three well-studied sedimentary basins along the south coast of Jamaica that contain records of hurricane activity: Grape Tree Pond (GTP), Manatee Bay Lagoon (MBL) and Wallywash Great Pond (WGP). Its passage as a rare Major Hurricane, provides a unique and unexpected opportunity to re-evaluate these records by comparing the geochemical and sedimentological signatures left behind in these sedimentary basins by the storm, with those of past events previously deposited in the sediment records. We aim to characterise the sedimentological and geochemical footprint of Hurricane Beryl and the impacts of the extremely active 2024 hurricane season, recorded in three sedimentary basins situated along the south coast of Jamaica. This characterisation will enable us to reconstruct past storm activity in different sediment archives, document the natural return periods of landfalling storms and help constrain climate models of future storm activity. We hypothesise that the two lagoon sites (MBL and GTP) will undergo changing salinity in response to the passage of storms during the 2024 hurricane season whereas the freshwater lake (WGP) will show a shift in water-isotope composition from the impact of 18O-depleted hurricane rainfall. Our objectives are: To collect water samples and live ostracod (calcite-shelled micro crustaceans) specimens from WGP during the proposed field season to determine their stable oxygen isotopic composition. To collect water samples and live ostracod specimens from MBL and GTP to characterise their water geochemistry during the 2024 hurricane season and determine their faunal composition. To collect live ostracod specimens from MBL and GTP and measure the Mg/Ca and Sr/Ca ratios, which are salinity proxies in these lagoons. To collect short (1-3m) sediment cores from WGP, MBL and GTP to capture the sediment-water interface at WGP and recently emplaced washover deposits within the context of the underlying sediment records at MBL and GTP. The proposed research will allow us to assess the natural return periods of landfalling storms in Jamaica and help constrain climate models of future hurricane activity. Beneficiaries will include the climate modelling community and governmental and non-governmental organisations in Jamaica such as the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) and the Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation (CCAM).
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