Uplift history along the Clermont Nose Traverse on the West Coast of Barbados during the last 500,000 years - Implications for paleo-sea level reconstructions

Barbados is one of the few localities in the world with uplifted fossil coral reef tracts that provide detailed insights into interglacial sea level change during the Late and Middle Pleistocene. Since the late 1960s, several sea level reconstructions have been established, each contributing to the '' Barbados Model '' of sea level change. Considering the global importance of paleo-sea level research in Barbados, it is important to note that substantial issues are still unresolved regarding the results obtained thus far. In this paper, we deal with one of the major problems of paleo-sea level reconstruction on Barbados-the assumption of constant uplift-which we test along the Clermont Nose traverse on the southern part of the west coast of Barbados. We demonstrate that uplift along this transect was not, in fact, constant over the last 500,000 years. The data from Clermont Nose strongly support the argument that anticlinal warped areas might have complex tectonic histories and are therefore not necessarily suitable for Pleistocene sea level reconstructions.