An annually resolved 5700-year storm archive reveals drivers of Caribbean cyclone frequency

Predictions of tropical cyclone (TC) frequencies are hampered by insufficient knowledge of their natural variability in the past. A 30-m-long sediment core from the Great Blue Hole, a marine sinkhole offshore Belize, provides the longest available, continuous, and annually resolved TC-frequency record. This record expands our understanding, derived from instrumental monitoring (73 years), historical documentations (173 years), and paleotempestological records (2000 years), to the past 5700 years. A total of 694 event layers were identified. They display a distinct regional trend of increasing storminess in the southwestern Caribbean, which follows an orbitally driven shift in the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Superimposed short-term variations match Holocene climate intervals and originate from solar irradiance–controlled sea-surface temperature anomalies and climate phenomena modes. A 21st-century extrapolation suggests an unprecedented increase in TC frequency, attributable to the Industrial Age warming.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Science Advances

• Publication date

  2025-03-14

• Fields of study

  Geology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1126/sciadv.ads5624PMID 40085712PMCID 11908496
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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