Hipercorig Hallstatt History (H3): Accessign a deep time window of Lake Hallstatt´s preHistory

The new hydraulic coring system Hipercorig was developed to recover undisturbed long cores from deep lacustrine sediment archives that record past environmental conditions and changes (Harms et al., 2020). Here we report initial results from the deep lake drilling project ‘Hipercorig Hallstatt History’, which succeeded to recover two 41m and 51m long cores and to conduct downhole logging in spring 2021 with the Hipercorig System on Lake Hallstatt. This inner-alpine lake, characterized by very high clastic sedimentation rates, is located in the heart of the UNESCO World Heritage region Hallstatt - Dachstein – Salzkammergut, whose early history of Stone Age settlement and salt mining is still not yet fully understood. Also, there is a lack of reliable observational data on past environmental and climatic conditions, and frequencies and impacts of meteorological and geological extreme events of that time, that are needed to holistically understand past environmental-human-environmental interactions. The new >50 m long sediment cores from Lake Hallstatt now overcomes the previous coring-depth limit (16 m subsurface, dated to ~2.3 cal ka BP) and covers a presumably continuous sedimentary succession throughout the Holocene and Late Pleistocene since the retreat of the Traun glacier. Here we present first results from the Hipercorig coring and logging campaign, along with initial results from whole-round core analyses (Multi-Sensor-Core-Logging; and X-ray Computed Tomography) and preliminary Core-Log-Seismic-Integration, revealing unprecedented scientific samples and data, that will provide unique insights into the early development of one of the oldest cultural landscapes in the world.