International Conference: The Towuti Drilling Project: Paleoenvironments, Biological Evolution, and Geomicrobiology of a Tropical Western Pacific Lake

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

The Towuti Drilling Project (TDP) is an international research program to understand long-term environmental and climatic change in the tropical western Pacific, the impacts of geological and environmental changes on the biological evolution of endemic aquatic taxa, and the geomicrobiology and geochemistry of metal-rich, ultramafic-hosted lake sediment. Lake Towuti is the largest and oldest lake in Southeast Asia, and thus holds one of the longest records of climate change anywhere in the region. The lake is home to dozens of species of endemic fish, snails, shrimp, and other organisms, and is surrounded by the most diverse rainforest on Earth. The lake is also one of the only large ferruginous (iron-rich) lakes on Earth, and hosts an exotic microbial community that is potentially analogous to the ecosystems that existed in early Earth's ferruginous oceans. In late 2015, the TDP (EAR-1401448) recovered over 1000 m of sediment drill core from the floor of Lake Towuti to reconstruct how Indo-Pacific climate and these unique ecosystems evolved during the Pleistocene epoch. This award provides support for an international workshop in Makassar, Indonesia, to synthesize results from the TDP and to plan research on the environmental history of Indonesia. Specific areas to be addressed include: 1) a new long, high-resolution record of tropical western Pacific climatic change during last ~1 million years to test the impacts of changes in global temperature, greenhouse gas concentrations, and other climate forcings on Indo-Pacific hydrology; 2) the response of Southeast Asian tropical rainforests to past climate change, including climates warmer than the present; 3) information on the age and history of the lake and the limnological conditions that gave rise to Lake Towuti's endemic fauna and flora; and 4) new insight into the microbial processes operating at depth in Towuti's sediments and their effects on sediment mineralogy and biogeochemistry.