This award supports a project to develop a detailed geochronology and to conduct reconnaissance paleolimnological proxy analyses on a unique suite of six sediment cores from an isolated, slow-sedimentation rate, interbasinal ridge in Lake Tanganyika, East Africa. Initial work suggests that sedimentation rates at this locality are an order of magnitude slower than any other site cored in the African rift valley lakes, and the oldest sediments in these cores may be as much as 100,000 years in age. No comparable high-quality, high-resolution, continuous paleoclimate records of such duration are available for the interior of equatorial Africa. Scientists will examine evidence of a 10 kyr "double" precessional cycle in the Lake Tanganyika paleolimnological record and to what extent the tempo of Northern Hemisphere ice volume fluctuation dominates the Lake Tanganyika system. This project is being conducted under the auspices of the IDEAL program (International Decade for the East African Lakes).
