Grain size analysis of sediments from deep Lake Malawi

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We propose to study the Holocene and last glacial sections of a well dated piston core from lake Malawi. This will be done by high resolution digital image analysis (sample width of 300 (m) of thin sections, based on the RADIUS method developed by Seelos & Sirocko, 2005. The Malawi sediments are partly laminated with an average sedimentation rate of 0.33 mm/yr. Thus the grain size record will have annual resolution, and allow to detect the history of eolian dust deflation and riverine flash floods, presenting an annual resolution time series of climate change in equatorial Africa for the last 25.000 years, in particular evaluating the low latitude climate during northern hemisphere cold events like the Little Ice age, the 8.2 ka event, Younger Dryas and Heinrich Events. This work is also a methodological study, because we will have to develop a new RADIUS algorithm for the very fine grained sediments of large lakes. When this algorithm is developed successfully in the first year of the project, the study can be continued further into the past on the ICDP Malawi sediments, but be also applied to other ICDP cores from deep lakes.