Global Lake-Level Variations from 18,000 to 0 Years Ago: A Palaeoclimatic Analysis

Lake-Level fluctuations have been recognized as an indicator of climate change on time scales ranging from 10 to 10^6 years. This is especially true of hydrologically-closed basins in which water-level fluctuations are not damped by varying rates of surface outflow. Evidence of past fluctuations occurs in a wide variety of forms, ranging from old shorelines and lake-side archaeological sites to geochemical, mineralogical, isotopic and palaeoecological analyses of sediment cores.