Lake Towuti Workshop: Paleoenvironments, Biological Evolution, and Geomicrobiology of an ultramafic, Tropical Pacific Lake; The Lake Towuti Drilling Project

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This proposal award provides funding to support the travel costs of six U.S. researchers to participate in a workshop in Bandung, Indonesia, in January 2012. The workshop is intended to develop a strategic plan for a new continental drilling project in Lake Towuti, Sulawesi, Indonesia, and will involve researchers from Indonesia, Canada, and Europe as well as the U.S. The geological record at Lake Towuti provides a unique opportunity to reconstruct climate change over multiple glacial-interglacial cycles in the Western Pacific, at the origin of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation. Drilling in Lake Towuti will identify the age and origin of the lake, the environmental and climatic context that shaped the evolution of its ecosystem, and changes in its geomicrobiology in response to climate variations over the past 60,000 years. This workshop will lay the groundwork for a major international research study that will yield important information about the atmospheric convection over Central Indonesia, which influences strongly the global atmospheric heat and water balances. The major costs of the workshop will be covered by the International Continental Drilling Program, which is based in Germany.Participation in this workshop by the U.S. researchers will ensure their access to the planned research and catalyze new intellectual collaborations of American faculty and students with their Indonesian counterparts by developing jointly the first scientific drilling project in the Western Pacific. Data generated by this program will contribute to a better understanding of global climate change over the centuries.