Project

Climate and environmental history of East Africa since the origin of modern humans: recovering a continuous 250.000-year lake sediment sequence from Lake Challa near Mt. Kilimanjaro

Acronym
DeepCHALLA
Code
319213446
Duration
01 May 2016 → 30 April 2020
Funding
Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)
Research disciplines
  • Natural sciences
    • Other chemical sciences
    • Geochemistry
    • Geology
    • Evolutionary biology
    • Other biological sciences
    • Aquatic sciences, challenges and pollution
Keywords
lake sediments
 
Project description

The research infrastructure that is the subject of this proposal are the lake-sediment cores from Lake Challa to be recovered by ICDP project DeepCHALLA, and which represent a globally unique resource for reconstructing the climate and environmental history of East Africa over the past ~250,000 years. Our specific aim is to retrieve continuous sediment sequences (as cores drilled in consecutive 3-m sections) from 3 sites within Lake Challa, each in triplicate to ensure that the overlapping sections together constitute an uninterrupted sample of the in situ sediment profile. The 3 sites are arranged in a nearshore-offshore transect and drilled to respectively ~25 m, ~100 m and ~210 m depth, thus allowing to determine the influence of near-shore sedimentation dynamics on the signatures of climate and ecosystem proxies preserved in the longest sequence from the lake center. Together these 9 drill cores will amount to ~1000 m of sediment contained in transparent butyrate core liners.