Description
Lake Issyk-Kul, located in the Kyrgyz Republic, is one of the deepest and largest lakes in the world. It occupies a deep basin within the Tien Shan mountain belt in Central Asia, which is presently one of the Earth’s tectonically most active intra-continental mountain belts, as a result of a compressional regime developing out of the India-Eurasia collision. Lake sediments can act as important “recorders” of the regional processes active during and after their deposition. Lake Issyk-Kul’s sediments likely comprise a promising record of tectonic events and past climate changes in the region, potentially ranging back to Miocene times.
To further investigate the lake for a potential drilling campaign of the International Continental Drilling Program (ICDP), a joint field program is planned by the Universities of Bremen and Cologne to image both the deep lake filling as well as a high-resolution history of deposition in conjunction with geological surface sampling and coring.
This proposal suggests a three weeks geophysical field campaign with multichannel seismic, sediment echosounder and multibeam.
Major scientific questions is the reconstruction of the long term history of the lake filling, tectonic deformation and paleoseismology, and which would be required for planning a marine drilling. Spatial mapping of major horizons, thickness of depositional units and reconstruction of tectonic movements shall give insight into the history of sediment delivery, lake level variations, continuity of deposition, major earthquake activity, basin evolution, regional tilting and development of a major fold structure. By developing a seismostratigraphic framework, the evolution of this basin shall be reconstructed, supporting and improving ICDP drilling strategies.