Bathymetric Survey of Lake Van (BathyVan), Turkey - finding answers to objectives not directly addressed by ICDP drilling at Lake Van

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As Lake Van (Eastern Anatolia) can act as a key site for the investigation of the Quaternary climatic evolution of the Near East, an ICDP drilling campaign was successfully conducted in summer 2010. Preliminarily first core analyses show that the drilled sediments contain 500,000 years of paleo-environmental and volcanic/geodynamic history. Due to financial limitations, only 2 out of 5 primary proposed sites were drilled leaving some of the key questions of the drilling proposal nearly untouched including lake-level history, tectonics, and the interactions between man and environment. First results from the drilling campaign, such as tephra deposits formed underwater and contrasting pore water profiles from the drilled sites, bring up new questions, including the occurrence of sub-aquatic volcanic activity and the hydro-geological evolution of individual basins. We propose to address these questions (tectonics, sub-aquatic volcanology, geo-hazards, lake level history, seepage, and sub-aquatic archeology) by collecting a high resolution bathymetric data set of Lake Van. The work should be complemented by seismic data acquisition in selected areas and gravity coring of specific features, such as historic slides and sediments around faults and volcanic edifices. The new data in combination with the drilling and other already available data will allow addressing several questions of the original ICDP proposal, hence, contributing significantly to the overall success of the entire drilling campaign.