Clues from hurricane 'fingerprints' Scientists decode hurricane
'records' left in trees and rocks to try to predict the strength
of future storms. (Page 2 of 2) To gather that information,
scientists first turned to sediment cores taken from marshes,
lagoons, and lakes behind barrier beaches. This "is the most
useful and proven technique to date," says Kam-biu Liu, a
Louisiana State University paleoclimatologist who first applied
the approach to the hurricane problem in 1989. As a tropical
cyclone makes landfall, the storm surge washes beach sand into
these bodies of water. The sand settles to the bottom, then gets
covered with organic material that forms most of the muck at the
bottom. The sand layers show up in the cores. Scientists can
find out when the storm or storms struck by using radiocarbon
dating techniques on the organic material above and below the
sandy layer. Dr. Liu and Jeffrey Donnelly of the Woods Hole
(Mass.) Oceanographic Institution have pioneered this approach
along the Gulf Coast and in