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Radiocarbon ages measured 2011 to 2021 on corals, shells, and plant fragments pertaining to sea floods of the past 1,000 years on Anegada, British Virgin Islands

Dates

Publication Date
Start Date
2011
End Date
2021

Citation

Atwater, Brian F., compiler, 2023, Field evidence noted in 2008 to 2023 that pertains to sea floods of the past millennium on Anegada, British Virgin Islands: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9TLLBOC.

Summary

This part of the data release provides an updated georeferenced list of radiocarbon ages pertaining to evidence for a catastrophic precolonial sea flood on Anegada, a low Caribbean island perched south of the Puerto Rico Trench. The list contains 64 ages measured on carbonate materials and 3 ages measured on plant fragments. Among the total of 67 ages, 43 are among the 47 ages previously tabulated on page 318 of https://doi.org/10.1130/GES01356.l. The 67 ages exclude those from previous work on deposits attributable to the 1755 Lisbon tsunami (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-010-9622-6). Among the 67 ages listed, the 24 ages previously unreported were measured mainly on samples collected in 2017. The main material dated is the aragonitic [...]

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Radiocarbon_sampling.jpg thumbnail 2.02 MB image/jpeg
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Radiocarbon.csv 12.81 KB text/csv
Radiocarbon.zip 6.98 KB application/zip

Purpose

The data release as a whole is intended to support assessments of hazards from unusually large tsunamis generated in the northeast Caribbean. The radiocarbon data in the release was collected to obtain an approximate age range for a catastrophic sea flood on Anegada, and to determine whether this sea flood differs statistically in age from the last of the precolonial conch fishing that is evidenced by conch shells, whether heaped or strewn, that have round extraction holes. The latter comparison is integrate to a manuscript, in preparation in 2023, that asks whether the precolonial sea flood terminated precolonial conch fishing from Anegada. Marine-reservoir ages and their local variability complicate the ages measured on coral clasts and molluscan shells. Broadly speaking, a local marine reservoir age for a mollusk may vary with the amount of old carbon that the animal ingests, as illustrated in the metadata file Lucines.xml.
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