The Chew Bahir Drilling Project: A Half-Million Year Climate Record from the Southern Ethiopian Rift, Crucible of Human Evolution

这项提议寻求继续为东非更新世湖泊沉积物分析和解释的部分费用提供资金，作为国际地球科学中心批准的原始人遗址和古湖钻探项目(HSPDP)的一部分。该项目的目的是恢复和解释跨越人类进化史和环境变化的关键时间间隔的长而连续的沉积物岩芯，靠近具有全球意义的原始人遗址。该提案的重点是五个选定的热泵项目选址之一：埃塞俄比亚南部的深水沉积盆地Chew Babir，该盆地的深部钻探已于2014年11月至12月成功完成。在周伯勒盆地西部发现了两个重合的沉积岩芯，其回收率为85%，初步结果表明这覆盖了气候历史的最后650-950ka。随后于2015年4月进行的第一次实验室活动表明，沉积沉积物似乎敏感地记录了降水和蒸发的变化，以及来源、传输机制和成岩过程。在未来两年的项目中，我们建议对取芯材料进行全面的地球化学和矿物学分析，同时对卫星遥感数据进行解释。这将使得一方面能够可靠地解释高分辨率的地球化学扫描和测井数据，另一方面能够破译代理人的形成过程。在这些核心标准化研究的基础上，我们将能够重建从轨道到十年时间尺度的气候过渡，这使我们能够测试与人类起源有关的气候演变假说。周巴希尔深井钻探项目的主要目标是：阐明气候变化(这些变化的时间、性质、突发性、大小和同步性，特别是冰期和间冰期之间的转变)在更新世期间哺乳动物(包括人类类群)进化中的作用。

This proposal seeks continued funding toward partial costs for the analysis and interpretation of Pleistocene lacustrine sediments in East Africa, as part of the ICDP - approved Hominid Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP). The aim of the project is to retrieve and interpret long continuous sediment cores spanning critical intervals of human evolutionary history and environmental change, close to globally-significant hominin sites. This proposal focuses on one of the five chosen sites for HSPDP: Chew Bahir, a deep sedimentary basin in southern Ethiopia, where the deep drilling has been successfully completed in Nov-Dec 2014. Two overlapping sediment cores with a >85% recovery rate could be retrieved from the western part of the Chew Bahir basin and first results suggest that this covers the last 650-950 ka of climatic history. The subsequent first laboratory campaign in April 2015, showed that the sedimentary deposits seems to have sensitively recorded both changes in precipitation and evaporation, as well as provenance, transport mechanisms and diagenetic processes. In the next two years of the project, we propose a comprehensive geochemical and mineralogical analysis of the cored material paired with the interpretation of satellite borne remote sensing data. This will allow a reliable interpretation of the high-resolution geochemical scan and logg data on the one hand and the deciphering of the proxy formation processes on the other hand. On the basis of these standardized studies of the core, we will be able to reconstruct climatic transitions on orbital to decadal time scales, which allows us to test climate-evolution hypotheses relevant to human origins. The main objectives of the Chew Bahir deep drilling project are: To illuminate the role of climate change (timing, nature, abruptness, magnitude, and synchronicity of these shifts especially the transitions between Glacial and Interglacial) in the evolution of mammalian (including hominin taxa) during the Pleistocene.