Lake Van Drilling Project "PALEOVAN", a long continental record in eastern Turkey: Geochronology, palynostratigraphy and environmental response on volcanic events

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Lake Van on the high plateau of eastern Anatolia in Turkey has a surface area of 3,520 km2, a volume of 575 km3, a maximum depth of 450 m, and extends for 130 km WSW-ENE. It is the fourth largest terminal lake in the world. Within the sensitive climate region of eastern Anatolia, it represents a first order continental climate archive between the Black Sea, the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea. Based on an ICDP deep drilling operation (coordinated by T.Litt), two sites with multiple holes were drilled in summer 2010. The Ahlat Ridge-Site, the most important site for paleoclimatological studies, was drilled on a low ridge in the deep basin (water depth 360 m) where a complete 220 m thick sedimentary section with 300 intercalated tephra layers was recovered. It holds a continuous climate archive encompassing ca 500,000 years partly based on annually laminated sediments. In this project proposal, particular attention is paid to provide a detailed Argon chronology based on tephra layers by using single crystals. The chonological frame is a precondition to correlate centennial-scale pollen analyses with global glacial-interglacial cycles. A further scientific goal is the environmental response on major volcanic events in the Lake Van region during the last 500 ka based on high-resolution annual-scale pollen analyses.