Late Quaternary dynamics of marine paleoenvironments and ecosystems in the Gulf of Corinth (eastern Mediterranean)

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The Mediterranean has been identified as a hot spot region of climatechange. Rising water temperatures and increasing seawater acidification threaten marine ecosystem functioning with potentially dramatic repercussions for the livelihood of coastal populations. The sedimentary record of interglacial periods offers unique opportunities to study climate forcing and its feedback with marine and terrestrial ecosystems on suborbital time scales. Only paleoclimatic and paleoecological data from well-distributed sites are able to capture the full extent temporal and spatial complexity of climate forcing over the Mediterranean region, necessary to inform model projections and mitigation strategies in a meaningful way. The herein presented proposal aims to study the drivers of suborbital variability in marine paleoenvironments and ecosystems in the Gulf of Corinth basin (eastern Mediterranean, IODP Site M0080) during interglacial periodsMIS 1 and MIS 5. Centennial-scale multi-proxy records will (i) constrain the timing, nature, and amplitude of paleoenvironmental variability; (ii) indentify the drivers of paleoenvironmental variability (forcing by high and low latitude climatic signals; local factors such as anthropogenic deforestation); (iii) explore successional dynamics ofplanktic and benthic foraminifera as a key group of the local ecosystem; and (iv) determine lead/lag relationships between the response of terrestrial and marine ecosystems to identified drivers controlling the depositional environment. The expected results will provide new insights into high and low latitude climatic forcing in theEastern Mediterranean and their significance for basin evolution, major research goals of IODP Expedition 381. At the same time, the project adds long-term paleoecological data sets to ongoing efforts in global change ecology towards generalized models of successional trajectories.