Collaborative Research: Lake Titicaca Drilling Project

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This award is for a collaborative research project to drill and core approximately 300 m of sediments at each of two sites in Lake Titicaca (Bolivia/Peru) with the primary objective of reconstructing a 0.5 million year history of climatic change in tropical South America. Lake Titicaca provides a unique opportunity to study a continuous record of past climate in tropical South America. It has a long, rapidly accumulating sediment record in its deep basins. Changes in lake level are well correlated with precipitation amounts (and temperature) in the Amazon basin, and tropical sea-surface temperatures in the adjacent equatorial Atlantic. Modern Lake Titicaca is a nearly closed basin, so that the studies of lake level, chemical composition, and biota are particularly indicative of changes in the amount of precipitation and the precipitation/evaporation ratio.