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 41 kyr to 100 kyr cycle world) has potential to shed light into spatial differences in Earth’s climate response, if applied carefully.

In this context, we use age-depth models along with stratigraphic and chronological information e.g. from tephrochronology, magnetostratigraphy and tuning to assess differences in sedimentation rates of limnic geoarchives. We focus on limnic records that have been investigated during International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) drilling projects, and specifically assess the influence of the Mid-Pleistocene Transition and the Mid-Brunhes Transition on sedimentation rates.