Lake Nam has a depth of approximately 100 metres. It is located at an altitude of more than 4700 metres above sea level on the Tibetan Plateau and is four times the size of Lake Constance. Starting in 2023, sediment cores with a total length of around 2200 metres shall be drilled from a floating drilling platform. The longest sediment core will reach a depth of roughly 700 metres. This shall allow researchers to look back on approximately one million years of geological history. They will receive information about the climate and life there in the past. Furthermore, the sediment cores extracted from below the lake shall provide insights into the uplift history of the Tibetan Plateau and make it possible to determine changes in Earth’s magnetic field. In order to receive all of these kinds of information, the sediment cores shall be split into small slices, which will then be investigated in the project partners’ (including Greifswald’s) own laboratories.
58 researchers from all over the world and various subject disciplines are contributing towards the research project, including high altitude medicine physiologists, who are interested in the effects of the high altitude on the human body. The aim of the project is to collect data and facts that shall help improve the description of changes to the climate and predictions of future climate conditions. ‘Global climate change will have a significant influence on Southeast Asia and thus also on the people who live here. This is because the development of this region’s climate is closely connected to the Asian monsoon system,’ explains Prof. Dr. Torsten Haberzettl, from Greifswald’s Institute of Geography and Geology. His colleague, Dr. Gerhard Daut, from the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena elaborates: ‘It is important to know as much as possible about the climate of the past in order to be able to improve models about future climate development and make them more reliable.’ ‘The sediment cores can reveal exactly which climate changes were seen in this region in the past, how fast these occurred and whether there were any threshold values that led to a radical change of the ecosystems,’ adds Prof. Dr. Volkhard Spieß, a geophysicist from Bremen.
By receiving the grant of 1,5 million USD for the drilling costs from the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program – ICDP, a further hurdle has been taken on the way to the deep drilling on the Tibetan plateau. The ideal drilling positions have already been determined in investigations that were funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The funds provided by the ICDP will now form the foundation of the planned drilling project. Further grant applications for co-financing the project are currently being drawn up and submitted to national funding organisations such as the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Israel Science Foundation, or the British funding organisation NERC. A significant portion of the drilling costs amounting to more than two million USD is being provided by the Chinese collaboration partners Prof. Dr. Liping Zhu and Prof. Dr. Junbo Wang from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research (Chinese Academy of Sciences) in Beijing. Before the planned start of drilling in 2023 there will be at least two preparatory meetings on location in order to address logistical challenges in these difficult surroundings and to inform the local inhabitants about the drilling project.
Further Information
Chair of Physical Geography at the University of Greifswald
Institute of Geography and Geology at the University of Greifswald
Location of Lake Nam
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Contact at the University of Greifswald
Prof. Dr. Torsten Haberzettl
Institute of Geography and Geology
Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Straße 16, 17489 Greifswald
Tel.: +49 3834 420 4511
torsten.haberzettluni-greifswaldde