PRELIMINARY RESULTS OF THE LAKE MALAWI DRILLING PROJECT

A major drilling project is being undertaken on Lake Malawi in February – March 2005 to recover long, continuous records of past climate change in the southern tropics of East Africa. Lake Malawi is the second largest lake in the East African Rift Valley. It is about 650 km long, 40 km wide, and has a maximum depth of 700 m. The lake is anoxic below a depth of 200 m. The drilling project targeted a deep-water site (600 m water depth) in the central basin, where seismic reflection profiles indicate a history of continuous sediment accumulation for at least the past million years. A second site is in about 400 m depth in the north basin, where piston cores recovered in the past have revealed a rich, 25,000-year record of past lake water temperature and dynamic response of the Intertropical Convergence Zone to global climate forcing. At the time of writing this abstract, drilling operations had not yet begun. This presentation will provide information on drilling operations, sediment core recovery, and estimates of what paleoclimate results will be produced in the coming years of analysis of this unique sequence of sediments.