Daily growth bands of giant clam shell: A potential paleoweather recorder
Hong Yan
Abstract
Paleoclimate research offers an overview of Earth's climate change over the past 65 million years or longer, but our knowledge of paleoweather (i.e., extreme weather events occurring in days or even hours and minutes) is almost absent because current paleoclimatic reconstructions rarely provide information with temporal resolutions shorter than a month. Recently, studies found that the Giant Clam shells from tropical Indo-Pacific region have clear daily growth bands and can provide daily to hourly resolution biogeochemical proxies records. These ultra-high resolution proxies can clearly record the activities of past extreme weather events, indicating that Giant Clam shells have the potential to be used as an unprecedented archives for paleoweather reconstructions. Here we will give a brief review about the potential of Giant Clam shells in paleoweather study.