So Far... The Best Of Lake Van

Lake Van in Eastern Anatolia (Turkey) is the world's largest alkaline lake and the fourth largest terminal lake. A long, almost continuous, and partly annually laminated sedimentary profile, recovered during the ICDP PALEOVAN campaign in 2010 provided valuable information about the climatic, vegetation, tectonic, and volcanic history of the region over the last ca. 600 ka (Litt & Anselmetti 2014 and references therein). Individual proxy records suggest that Lake Van and its vicinity experienced significant hydroclimatic changes in concert with glacial/interglacial cycles and Dansgaard/Oeschger oscillations. The results of the original PALEOVAN project constituted an excellent framework and motivated further problem-oriented research. The last 10 years have seen a number of inspiring publications testing strengths and limitations of carbonate-based proxies in lakes and deepening our understanding of forcing mechanisms and rates of ecological changes.

Here we summarise the highlights of Lake Van research to date and offer a perspective on exciting ongoing work. Systematic analyses of the sedimentary carbonate inventory of Lake Van put the mineralogy of lacustrine carbonates in the limelight and revealed caveats of geochemical analyses on bulk samples (McCormack et al., 2018, 2019). Moreover, these studies stretched the envelope of dolomite-forming environments and early diagenetic products (McCormack & Kwiecien, 2021; McCormack et al., 2023). The established climatic context (Pickarski et al., 2015a, 2015b) and annually laminated nature of Lake Van sediments enabled the quantitative estimation of the time vegetation takes to recover after volcanic eruptions and elucidated the effect tephra deposition has on in-lake productivity (Pickarski et al., 2023).  Lake Van sediments keep on giving, with ongoing projects targeting the timing and mechanism of the lake closure and high-resolution comparisons of the impact of interglacial warming on (pan)regional hydroclimate. So perhaps 'The Best Of' is yet to come!

References

Litt & Anselmetti 2014. Lake Van deep drilling project PALEOVAN. Quaternary Science Reviews

McCormack & Kwiecien, 2021. Coeval primary and diagenetic carbonates in lacustrine sediments challenge palaeoclimate interpretations. Scientific Reports

McCormack, et al., 2019. Refining the interpretation of lacustrine carbonate isotope records: Implications of the mineralogy-specific Lake Van case study. Chemical Geology

McCormack et al., 2018. Controls on cyclic formation of Quaternary early diagenetic dolomite. Geophysical Research Letters

McCormack, et al., 2023. Hydrochemical mixing‐zones trigger dolomite formation in an alkaline lake. Sedimentology.

Pickarski et al., 2023. Volcanic impact on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in the Eastern          Mediterranean, Communications Earth & Environment

Pickarski et al., 2015b. Vegetation and environmental changes during the last interglacial in eastern Anatolia (Turkey): a new high-resolution pollen record from Lake Van. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology

Pickarski et al., 2015a. Abrupt climate variability of eastern Anatolia vegetation during the last glacial. Climate of the Past