Meenakshi

The coastal landforms (barrier islands, estuaries, lagoons, lakes and beaches) formed along the coastline contain information regarding everchanging sea-levels and paleo-coastlines. West coast of India is controlled by the Indian summer monsoon, thus understanding the archived climatic signals in the coastal sediments give the information about past monsoonal and sea level changes. Indian peninsula has a vast coastline where, monsoon controlled south-western coast of India has a thick pile of sediments deposited during Holocene (Padmalal et al., 2013) with signatures of dynamic sea level and climatic records. Geochemical data provides the information about sediment deposition, processing and transportation history as chemical composition of the sediments is susceptible to the variations in source rock, climate, tectonics, depositional settings and post-depositional processes (Nesbit and Young, 1982; Taylor and McLennan, 1985). The estuarine sediments from varies estuaries in the Kerela coast have been studied for the provenance, heavy mineral, anthropogenic pollution, Holocene climate and Sea level changes while the beaches and barrier islands lack such attention yet. The cores from Kerala-Konkan basin unveiled the signatures of three generations of peat deposits resulted due to the changes in monsoonal patterns (Kumaran et al., 2005). At shallow depth of 1-3 m, the signatures of palaeo-flood event during Holocene climate optimum were recovered in the sub-surface of the Kerala coast (Kumaran et al., 2018). Kunte (1995) categorized Vypin-Cochin Island as a barrier island system formed through three phases of regression-transgression-regression. The barrier islands are the narrow land strip that runs parallel to coastline and separated from the mainland by back waters, covered by thick pile of sediments and infiltrated by the sea water at places (Oertel, 1985). The geochemical signatures in the Vypin-Cochin Island sediments near the Cochin estuary haven’t been studied yet. The attempts to understand the paleoenvironmental depositional conditions and coastal dynamics during late Holocene are needed in which mineralogical changes in the coastal sediments as well as the geochemical proxies can help in understanding coastal paleo-processes.