Beschreibung
Lake Baikal is well-known as a magnificent sedimentary basin located in the central part of the Baikal Rift Zone (BRZ). The BRZ is known as one of the world’s two most active continental rift zones and a prime location for understanding fundamental processes involved in continental rifting and the evolution of lacustrine rift basins. Located in south-central Siberia, just north of the Mongolian border, Lake Baikal is ideally positioned to test important paleoclimate as well as tectonic models for several reasons: The climate of the Baikal region has the highest degree of continentality of any continent, This region has experienced mountain glaciation during the Pleistocene but not the massive continental ice sheets which disturbed the sedimentary records of the Great Laurentian Lakes of North America, and other lakes of northern Europe and northwestern Siberia. Seasonal energy balance models have shown that this continental interior exhibits the highest degree of response to Milankovitch insolation variations. The Baikal Rift Zone has a direct geo-genetic linkage to the tectonic evolution of Asia during the Cenozoic, particularly the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau. Continental scientific drilling of the Lake Baikal rift basin sediments, therefore, is essential for realizing the mutual goals of reconstructing the long-term paleoclimatic history of Central Asia and understanding the geologic history of the Baikal Rift Zone. An eight-year investment in developing a multi-national infrastructure and scientific data base, including excellent multi-channel seismic and multi-proxy calibration data, is being realized through publications and special presentations. Results from previous drilling and multichannel seismic surveys demonstrate that numerous sites exist in Lake Baikal for recovery of continuous hemipelagic lacustrine sediments, that a robust geochronology can be developed for the Late Cenozoic at these sites, that these sediments exhibit high sensitivity to rapid paleoclimate and tectonic events, and that these sediments contain multiple proxies for resolving high resolution paleoclimate records.