摘要: | As an active member with a full partnership in IMAGES since 1996, Taiwan has participated in the IMAGES program and has played an active role in both ship-board and shore-based research. Taiwanese scientists up to now have participated successfully four cruises (IMAGES II, III, IV, and V) and one recently NSC-funded western Pacific cruise (IMAGES WEPAMA cruise, Hedland, Australai to Kochi, Japan, April 30 - June 18, 2001) with great success. By participating these IMAGES cruises, Taiwanese scientists working together with international colleagues from France, Germany, and Japan, have successfully retrieved 15 giant piston cores from the western Pacific. Our major scientific goal in participating the IMAGES cruises is to retrieve high-quality, high-resolution marine sedimentary records for better understanding late Quaternary western Pacific climate variability. The climate in the western Pacific plays an important role in global climate. It is therefore crucial to document the tempo and mode of western Pacific climate variability of the past 300,000 years, the focused time-scale by IMAGES programs, in order to gain insight into the mechanisms that drove paleoclimate change. The PIs of NSC IMAGES projects are currently working on shore with primary emphases on generating core data of planktic foraminifer stable isotopes and faunal assemblages, alkenone, Mg/Ca as proxies for sea-surface temperature; and organic-C, carbonate, and opal as proxies for productivity, preservation, and terrestrial input effects; and environmental magnetism as tools for high-resolution stratigraphic correlation and riverine/eolian indicators; and of radiogenic isotope Th and U data for estimating sediment flux. The surface ocean variability shown in these records can be correlated with global climate changes over millennial to orbital timescales, suggesting a teleconnection mechanism which may change the westerly or East Asia monsoon systems that in turn affect the global ocean climate. Aiming at coring high-resolution deep sea records, our new coring projects in the IMAGES WEPAMA cruise put primarily emphasizes on three areas of the western Pacific marginal seas: (1) Indonesian Sea & Southern parts of the SCS; (2) East China Sea - Southern Okinawa Trough; and (3) Northeastern |