Continental Drilling in the East African Rift Lakes: A Strategic Planning Workshop

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

This grant supports a workshop to develop a strategic plan for continental scientific drilling in the East African Rift Lakes. The objectives are to bring together experts in the fields of paleoclimatology, paleoanthropology, climate modeling, paleoceanography, scientific drilling operations, rift basin tectonics, volcanology, and stratigraphy, in order to define and prioritize key scientific goals of these diverse disciplines, and to link these goals to specific, prioritized lake drilling targets within a cost/benefit framework. Following the successful scientific drilling operations in Lake Malawi, there has been an enormous level of activity within the paleoclimate and geophysics communities that has provided necessary site survey and background data that could lead to drilling in several of the East African lakes, including Lakes Tanganyika, Albert, Victoria, and Turkana. These developments have set the stage for new drilling projects to develop long, quantitative, highly resolved records from some of the world's best lacustrine archives of Plio-Pleistocene tropical paleoclimate. Each lake would provide very different temporal resolution and continuity and thus different insights into African environmental history. Each drilling target also would have very different costs and technical challenges. Future lake drilling programs must consider how to maximally complement ongoing initiatives to generate new African paleoenvironmental records using offshore marine sediments and speleothems and drilling initiatives in paleolakes. Given the enormous scientific opportunities for scientific drilling in the East African rift lakes, we propose that a workshop is needed to determine how best to proceed, through a cost/benefit analysis of the technical challenges and scientific outcomes of each drilling target. Intellectual Merit: The East African rift lakes contain an unparalleled record of climatic and environmental history through the Plio-Pleistocene spanning tens of degrees of latitude, with resolution and continuity comparable to deep-sea sediments and ice cores. Results from scientific drilling in these lakes will directly meet several key areas of emphasis, including investigations of the changing aspects of life, ecology, environments, and biogeography in past geologic time and understanding the complexities of Earth's deep time (pre-Holocene) climate systems. The workshop will identify new research areas that lie between paleoclimatology, paleoanthropology, and tectonics, fostering transdisciplinary research and complementing the key goals of the NSF Continental Dynamics and Human Origins programs. In addition, our workshop will develop research priorities for sedimentary and paleoenvironmental studies of the Plio-Pleistocene in East Africa, promoting future scientific investigations in this region. This plan will published in a workshop report, and will set the stage for full drilling proposals to ICDP and NSF. Broader Impacts: The workshop will foster broader collaborations among specialists from varied disciplines, including paleoclimate, paleoanthropology, and rift basin tectonophysics, promoting a truly interdisciplinary model for scientific drilling in lakes. The workshop also offers opportunities for international collaborations between American, European, and African scientists, many of whom are also women or early career scientists. The proposed workshop participant list reflects the desire to build participation from diverse international backgrounds and groups traditionally underrepresented in sciences.