Abstract
Abstract. We sketch the initial history of collecting deep cores in terrestrial and marine sedimentary basins and ice cores to study environmental and climate change. Subsequently, we focus on the development of long records from the Northern Andes. The 586 m long pollen record from ancient Lake Bogotá reflects the last 2.25 × 106 years with ∼ 1.2 kyr resolution, whereas the sediment core reflects almost the complete Quaternary. The 58 m long composite core from Lake Fúquene covers the last 284 ka with ∼ 60 years resolution. We address the various challenges and limitations of working with deep continental cores. For the tropics, the presence of these deep cores has made the Northern Andes a key area in developing and testing hypotheses in the fields of ecology, paleobiogeography, and climate change. We summarize the results in the figures, and for details on the paleoenvironmental reconstructions, we refer to the corresponding literature. We provide an overview of the literature on long continental records from all continents (see the Supplement). Based on our 50 years of experience in continental core drilling, developing a research capacity to analyze the large amounts of samples, and keeping a team together to publish the results, we listed suggestions in support of deep continental records aimed at studying environmental and climate change over long intervals of time.
Highlights
Our understanding of past climate change at Quaternary timescales has mainly been fueled by records from deep seafloor sediments (e.g., Tiedeman et al, 1994) and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets (Andersen et al, 2004; Dansgaard et al, 1982)
Marine sediments were explored in the frame of the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP), which started back in 1966 and was later continued under the names Ocean Drilling Program (ODP), Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), and International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP)
Analyses of slow proxies should be combined with rapid grain size and geochemical analyses based on X-ray fluorescence (XRF) to obtain a series of results over the course of a long continental drilling project
Summary
Our understanding of past climate change at Quaternary timescales has mainly been fueled by records from deep seafloor sediments (e.g., Tiedeman et al, 1994) and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets (Andersen et al, 2004; Dansgaard et al, 1982). H. Hooghiemstra et al.: 60 years of scientific deep drilling in Colombia demanded critical preparation and well-organized logistics of the projects. The preparation time for a successful drilling operation still varies between 3 and 8 years (https://www.icdp-online.org/home/, last access: 9 September 2021), and results from continental records suffer from slow data processing, such as the manual and timeconsuming analyses of biotic proxies such as pollen, diatoms, and phytoliths (Flenley, 1984, 1985). Analyses of slow proxies should be combined with rapid grain size and geochemical analyses based on X-ray fluorescence (XRF) to obtain a series of results over the course of a long continental drilling project
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