Collaborative Research: Millennial-scale fluctuations of Dry Valleys lakes: Implications for regional climate variability and the interhemispheric (a)synchrony of climate change

Millennial-scale fluctuations of high-level, closed-basin, amplifier lakes in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica have the potential to form an independent paleoclimatic data set with which to test synchrony of abrupt climate changes north and south of the Antarctic Convergence. The ideal way in which to reconstruct past water-level and environmental variations from these lakes is to integrate the geomorphological record from shorelines and deltas with a series of cores taken from the lake bottoms. We obtained transects of long cores from Lakes Fryxell, Bonney, Joyce, and Vanda and employed a multiparameter approach to extract the greatest possible amount of former water-level, glaciological, and paleoenvironmental data from Dry Valleys lakes. Chronology cane from U/Th and 14C dating of carbonates and 14C dating of algae. Evaluation of the link between lake-level and climate will come from hydrological and energy-balance modelling in collaboration with Dr. Andrew Fountain.
Combination of the more continuous lake-core sequences with the spatially extensive geomorphological record will result in an integrated Antarctic lake-level and paleoclimate dataset that extends back at least 30,000 years. This record will be compared to Dry Valleys glacier records and to the Antarctic ice cores to address questions of regional climate variability, and then to other Southern Hemisphere and Northern Hemisphere records to assess interhemispheric synchrony or asynchrony of climate change.