The full programme book (PDF) - Royal Geographical Society

T3
SCOPSCO Lake Ohrid deep drilling project: understanding the climatic history and
biological evolution of an ancient European lake
Jack H. Lacey 1 *, Melanie J. Leng 1,2 , Alexander Francke 3 , Bernd Wagner 3
1 Department of Geology, University of Leicester, LE1 7RH
2 NERC Isotope Geosciences Laboratory (NIGL) British Geological Survey, Nottingham, NG12 5GG
3 Institute for Geology and Mineralogy, University of Cologne, 50674 Köln, Germany
Lake Ohrid (Macedonia/Albania) is the oldest lake in modern Europe, forming during the
Pliocene-Lower Pleistocene, and exhibits an outstanding degree of endemic biodiversity
with over 210 described unique species; when overall size is taken into account this
makes it the most biologically diverse in the world. Lake Ohrid has been the subject of
intensive research over the last decade, where past climate, environment and tectonics
have been investigated to show that the lake provides a high-resolution archive suitable
for long-term palaeoenvironmental reconstructions. To date, there have been several short
cores recovered that span the last glacial-interglacial cycle and in Spring 2013 the ICDP
SCOPSCO deep drilling project retrieved a total of 2.1 km of core from 4 separate
localities. Regarded as one of the most successful ICDP lake drilling campaigns ever, the
project recovered a 568 m composite profile from thick, undisturbed sediments in the
center of the lake that likely covers >1.2 million years of Mediterranean history. The
SCOPSCO project aims to study: (1) the age and origin of the lake, (2) the seismotectonic
history of the area, (3) the climatic change and volcanic activity in the central northern
Mediterranean and (4) the link between geological/environmental events and the
extraordinary endemic biodiversity. Initial results from borehole logging, geochemical and
magnetic susceptibility data suggest the lake is highly sensitive to global temperature
changes, where carbonate precipitation and preservation tracks glacial-interglacial cycles.
A core recovered in June 2011 has been investigated to provide the highest-resolution
and best chronologically constrained record so far through the Late Glacial-Holocene,
which will act as a recent calibration to reconstruct climate and hydrology over the entire
lake history.
Keywords: Lake Ohrid; Mediterranean; Pleistocene; palaeolimnology; stable isotopes;
endemism