Collaborative Research: Lake Baikal Drilling Project: High Resolution Studies of Paleoclimate Change in South-Central Siberia During the Plio-Pleistocene

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9614426 King This project will involve the completion of the Principal Investigator's scientific investigation of high resolution signals of paleoclimate change recorded in Plio-Pleistocene sediments of Lake Baikal. The Baikal Drilling Project (BDP) is a multinational effort (Russia, Japan, Germany, USA) to extract the record of global climate change and tectonic evolution of the Lake Baikal sedimentary basin. Historically, the BDP began in 1989 as a joint Russian-American scientific venture. In January 1993, the BDP team, in cooperation with the NEDRA Drilling Enterprise of Yaroslavl, Russia, successfully deployed a light-weight drilling rig from a barge frozen into position on the Lake. With this system, the first long (100m) hydraulic piston cores were successfully recovered from two holes in 354m water depth providing climate data spanning the last 600,000 years. In January-March 1996 technological improvements of the BDP drilling system made by NEDRA enabled drilling to a subbottom depth of 250m, providing data on climate change up to 4.5 million years ago. Planned drilling will examine the response of Siberia's energy balance to the initiation and intensification of northern hemisphere glaciation (3 - 2.8 Ma) and the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau. One of the important hypotheses to be tested is the extent to which the long- term climatic evolution of Siberia has influenced the distribution of tundra and wetlands in central Asia and thus affected the global methane balance. ***