HOLIVAR2006 Abstracts
Water at "World's End": Laguna Potrok Aike – a new ICDP lake drilling site in southern Patagonia, Argentina.
Bernd Zolitschka1, Christian Ohlendorf1, Torsten Haberzettl1, Flavio Anselmetti2, Daniel Ariztegui3, Hugo Corbella4, Frank Niessen5 and Sabine Wulf6
1GEOPOLAR, University of Bremen, Celsiusstr. FVG-M, D-28359 Bremen, Germany
2Geological Institute, ETH Zentrum, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland
3Institute Forel, Rue des Maraîchers 13, CH-1205 Geneva, Switzerland
4Argentine Museum of Natural History, Av. Angel Gallardo 470, Buenos Aires, Argentina
5Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, D-27515 Bremerhaven, Germany
6GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam, Telegrafenberg, D-14473 Potsdam, Germany
Contact: Bernd Zolitschka (zoli@uni-bremen.de)
Increasing evidence demonstrates that the Southern Ocean plays a key role for understanding the global climate system. The most extreme ocean-land ratio globally is encountered at the latitudes of Patagonia between 40° and 60°S where 98% of water is juxtaposed to 2% of land. This region is subject to shifts in polar and mid-latitude pressure fields and precipitation regimes as well as to El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Antarctic Oscillation (AO). Thus it can provide unique records of variations in (1) climate and (2) hydrology and also in (3) aeolian dust deposition and (4) volcanic activities. Moreover, such records act as a continental counterpart to marine and ice core records and also as a cornerstone for palaeodata-model comparison. In the dry Patagonian steppe east of the Andes with ephemeral lakes dominating, only the 100 m deep and 770 ± 220 kyr old maar lake Laguna Potrok Aike (52°S, 70°W; 113 m a.s.l.; diameter: 3.5 km) provides the potential to recover a continuous record of the last glacial/interglacial cycle(s). The 19 m long piston core currently analysed covers 16,000 years and provides a complex high-resolution record of hydrological variations and volcanic history. Additionally, this unique terrestrial record has the potential to establish links to ice cores from Antarctica and to marine records from the Southern Oceans where dust and tephra of Patagonian provenance have been detected. Drilling this sedimentary record can only be achieved in the framework of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) to which the Potrok Aike Sediment Archive Drilling Project (PASADO: www.SALSA.uni-bremen.de) has been submitted successfully.
Bernd is professor of geomorphology and polar research (GEOPOLAR, Institute of Geography) at the University of Bremen. His research group GEOPOLAR focuses on environmental reconstructions based on the investigation of lake-catchment systems to better understand the natural and anthropogenic forcing of sedimentological processes – a contribution to palaeoclimatology and limnogeology. Bernd's special interests are annually laminated lake sediments as a dating tool and a means for high-resolution reconstructions of the past.