Pleistocene and Holocene Carbonate Environments on San Salvador Island, Bahamas : San Salvador Island, Bahamas, July 2 - 7, 1989 (Volume T175)

Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Field Trip Guidebooks Series, Volume 175.Although isolated and small in size, San Salvador Island is in many ways a unique place--an all carbonates setting on a small, tectonically stable platform, surrounded by deep oceanic waters, and an historical footnote as the widely accepted first landing site of Christopher Columbus in the New World in 1492.

Columbus' stay here was brief, and the major events of subsequent history largely have passed San Salvador by.

This is not a tourist island; the natural beauty, floras, and faunas of the Bahamas are well preserved here.The overview theme of this series of field excursions on San Salvador will be interpretation of paleodepositional environments for the well-exposed Pleistocene and Holocene carbonate rocks that cap the island and recognition of modem analogues from the varied carbonate environments found on the island and its surrounding shelf.

Questions of sea level history, diagenetic change, and the surficial processes operating on carbonate island terranes also will be considered.

Our trip will begin with a low-attitude overflight to view features of the main Bahama platform enroute to San Salvador, which lies just beyond the eastern edge of the platform.