Beschreibung
The Tibetan Plateau is often called Earth’s “Third Pole” plays a crucial role in the global climate system. This remote region, with its glaciers, rivers, and unique ecosystems, not only hosts numerous endemic species but also feeds major Asian rivers that sustain hundreds of millions of people dowmstream. Yet, despite its critical importance for climate regulations and water resources, little is known about how climate, hydrology, and both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems on the Tibetan Plateau have evolved over geological timescales.
Most paleoclimate records from the Tibetan Plateau either cover only short time intervals or are highly fragmented. Deep and large freshwater systems such as Lake Nam Co serve as unique natural archives, capable of recording several hundred thousand to millions of years of paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental history. Located at the climatic boundary between the Asian monsoon and the westerlies, Lake Nam Co receives both summer monsoon rainfall and glacial meltwater, making its sediments an ideal “time capsule” for reconstructing past climate, hydrological variability and ecosystem dynamics.
In 2024, the ICDP NamCore drilling campaign recovered more than 1,100 m of sediment cores from Lake Nam Co, representing over 600,000 years of environmental history. These cores offer an unprecedented opportunity to investigate how climate, glaciers, lake levels, vegetation, and phytoplankton communities have interacted through successive glacial–interglacial cycles. The project also contributes to international continental-scale drilling transects, linking the Lake Nam Co record to broader Asian monsoon dynamics and global climate patterns.
Our research will apply a multi-proxy approach, integrating bulkgeochemical, isotopic and lipid biomarker analyses, to reconstruct past temperatures, precipitation, lake-level, and vegetation changes on the Tibetan Plateau. This approach will generate quantitative insights into climate and hydrological variability driven by orbital forcing, disentangle the interactions between the monsoon and the westerlies, and resolve both long-term temperature trends and abrupt climate change events. Furthermore, we will examine ecosystem responses, shifts between C₃ and C₄ vegetation, and carbon cycling, illuminating the resilience of high-altitude ecosystems under climate stress.
By establishing Lake Nam Co as a benchmark archive for the central Tibetan Plateau, this project will advance our understanding of how alpine environments have responded to past climate changes, improve predictions of future regional warming, and provide fundamental data on the long-term behavior of the Asian monsoon system, glaciers, and carbon reservoirs.