Lake Van Drilling Project 'PALEOVAN', a long continental record in eastern Turkey: Paleoecological investigations on new cores obtained during the ICDP deep drilling operation in 2010

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Lake Van on the high plateau of eastern Anatolia in Turkey has a surface area of 3,520 km2, a volume of 575 km3, a maximum depth of 450 m, and extends for 130 km WSW-ENE. It is the fourth largest terminal lake in the world. Within the sensitive climate region of eastern Anatolia, it represents a first order continental climate archive between the Black Sea, the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea. Based on an ICDP deep drilling operation (coordinated by the applicant), two sites with multiple holes were drilled in summer 2010. The ‘Ahlat Ridge’-Site, the most important site for palaeoclimatological studies, was drilled on a low ridge in the deep basin (water depth ~360 m) where a complete 220 m thick sedimentary section was recovered. It holds a continuous climate archive encompassing ca 500,000 years partly based on annually laminated sediments. In this project proposal, particular attention is paid to the identification and interpretation of vegetation and climate oscillations during the last glacialinterglacial cycles by using pollen and isotope data. We will determine if pollen variations are correlated temporally with orbital forcing and Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles. Through such an approach we will evaluate the timing, direction, and magnitude of continental environmental changes and compare them with marine and ice-core records.