Comparing lacustrine sedimentation rates and their response to climatic and environmental change

Continuous limnic archives may record millions of years of climatic and environmental change at their locality. Typically, such archives reflect environmental conditions in the lakes’ catchments, but also the imprint of large-scale atmospheric systems e.g. related to insolation and/or global ice-sheet dynamics. These parameters may vary considerably in space and time, and our understanding on patterns across continents that relate to this forcing is still incomplete. Comparing sedimentation rates from limnic archives covering fundamental changes in the Earth’s system like the Mid-Pleistocene transition (change from 41kyr to 100kyr cycle world) has potential to shed light into spatial differences in Earth’s climate response, if applied carefully.

To better understand the sedimentation history of lakes, and especially their reaction to climate transitions, we compare sedimentation rates from lakes. In a second step, we systematically align several records to facilitate best comparability. We focus on limnic records that have been investigated during ICDP projects, and specifically assess the influence of the Mid-Pleistocene transition and the Mid-Brunhes transition on sedimentation rates.