Evaluating Foraminifera as a Tool for Recreating Historical Landscapes and Verifying Cartographic Accuracy at Fort Fisher, North Carolina

1 online resource (232 pages) : PDF

2015

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

The research in this thesis focused on the use of Foraminifera to determine paleo-subenvironments and to quantify changes in the subenvironments through time at Fort Fisher, North Carolina. Historical maps were assessed with respect to the subenvironmental changes through time as recorded by Foraminifera. To establish past subenvironments, eight modern surface samples were collected from various subenvironments surrounding the Fort Fisher Historical site. These modern samples were compared to 98 samples taken from five cores, which were recovered from the marshes behind the fort. These samples were transported to UNC Charlotte and were wet sieved and analyzed for Foraminifera content. The number of Foraminifera from each core, surface, and beach sample was recorded and then compiled to recreate the subenvironments through time. Geochronology was established using radiocarbon dates from buried organic matter.The Fort Fisher Historical Site, an old Confederate military base, was chosen as the place of study due to the availability of images, aerial photographs, and hand-drawn historical maps that date back to the American Civil War. Aerial photographs and hand-drawn maps of the area were available through military atlases, the United States Geological Survey (USGS), and local and state governments. High-resolution satellite images from the 1990s to the present were accessed through Google Earth. Maps of Fort Fisher with the location of the surface and core samples overlain were created using the suite of tools in ArcGIS, and the ArcPy module in the language script Python. To determine the effectiveness of using Foraminifera as a tool for recreating paleo-subenvironments and past shoreline positions, the laboratory data from the core samples were compared to the maps from the chronoequivalent period. Additional emphasis was placed on maps from the Civil War, particularly maps from 1865, in order to validate historians’ accounts of the battles that occurred at Fort Fisher.

masters theses

Geodesy
Environmental sciences
Marine biology

M.S.

Arcgis
Change in Marsh Subenvironments
Foraminifera
Fort Fisher
Historical Maps

Earth Sciences

Hippensteel, Scott

Garo, Laurie
Chen, Gang

Thesis (M.S.)--University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2015.

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