Paleoenvironmental and climate reconstructions in the winter rainfall zone (WRZ) of South Africa using integrated investigations of lacustrine and marine archives ('CAUSAL')

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Recent global climate change affects the availability of water in many semi-arid and arid regions of the world such as for example southern Africa. In order to precisely predict future variations of the regional water budget and climate, the identification of driving forces of environmental and climate dynamics during the past as well as their spatio-temporal variations are essential. The intended research project will contribute to the understanding of Holocene environmental and climate variations in the winter rainfall zone of South Africa. Within the requested project paleoenvironmental, paleoclimatic, and sea level changes during the past will be reconstructed in high-resolution using a multi-proxy approach. This is based on geochemical, mineralogical and bio-geochemical analyses on an already existing 13.65 m long lacustrine sediment core from the coastal lake Verlorenvlei covering the past 9,000 cal BP. Similar data will be provided by project partners from investigations of a marine sediment core located off the coast near Verlorenvlei. Comparison of both archives will unravel proxy alterations during transport from land to sea and help to acquire a true climatic signal. Besides natural climate variability, investigations on the lacustrine sediments are assumed to reveal new information on human impact on the environment. From the other two rainfall zones of South Africa (year-round- and summer rainfall zone) similar investigations of paired terrestrial and marine archives are provided by partners from the so-called RAIN project which is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) aiming to investigate terrestrial and marine sedimentary archives in southern Africa and to which the here proposed project will be associated to. This will enable a reconstruction of the development of Holocene environmental dynamics within the three different rainfall zones of South Africa. The identification of the spatio-temporal variations of the drivers for regional environmental change will also contribute to the understanding of global climatic dynamics.