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A team of three co-PIs (Kam-biu Liu, Jeff Donnelly, and Matt Peros) will use a multi-site approach to reconstruct century-to-millennial-scale records of intense hurricane strikes in the Caribbean region using coastal sedimentary proxies. Due to the combination of storm surge and extreme wave energy washing over barrier beaches and sand dunes, intense landfalling hurricanes can leave a distinct sedimentary signature in coastal lakes, backbarrier lagoons, salt ponds, marshes, and swamps. This sedimentary signature usually occurs in the form of an overwash sand layer embedded in more organic-rich sediments (e.g., lake mud or peat). The principal research methodology will involve piston-coring or vibra-coring of coastal lakes, lagoons, salt ponds, and swamps; high-resolution stratigraphic and paleoecological analyses of sediment cores to identify overwash deposits; and dating of sediments by ¹⁴C, ²¹⁰Pb, and ¹³⁷Cs techniques. Principal study sites are in Mexico, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Jamaica, and Cuba.