Lake Van

Lake Van is the fourth largest terminal lake in the world, extending for 130 km WSW-ENE on a high plateau at 1674 a.s.l. in eastern Anatolia, Turkey. The 450 m deep lake is surrounded by active volcanoes within a tectonically active area. The annually-laminated sedimentary record of Lake Van promises to be an excellent paleoclimate and paleoenvironment archive because it potentially yields a long and continuous continental sequence that covers several glacial-interglacial cycles (~500 kyr).
Therefore, Lake Van will be drilled in summer 2010 in the context of the International Scientific Continental Drilling Program (ICDP) with a strong involvement of Eawag researchers. This drilling project will target the Quaternary climatic, environmental, volcanic and tectonic evolution in the Near East at the cradle of human civilization.

Specific goals of the PaleoVan project are to reconstruct the:

• Paleoclimate development in a sensitive semiarid region based on proxy data and modeling
• Dynamics of lake level fluctuations and hydrogeological development
• Formation and age of Lake Van
• History of volcanism and volcanic activity based on tephrostratigraphy
• Variations of the earthmagnetic field and solar activity
• Tectonic, paleoseismic and earthquake activity
• Interaction between man and environment since prehistoric time

Contact persons: Flavio Anselmetti, Jürg Beer, Rolf Kipfer, Carsten Schubert, Mike Sturm