Introduction to “Progress towards reconstructing past climate in Central Eurasia, with special emphasis on Lake Baikal”

Abstract

concentration will further act to exacerbate changesin biogeography, productivity, water quantity, andwater quality. Yet, in this region, both experimentswith quasi-realistic climate models and palaeoclimatereconstructions from proxies in natural archives areunderrepresented. Given the remoteness of CentralEurasia (far from ice sheet and oceanic influences), itis not prudent to simply extrapolate climate changesignals from the Atlantic or the Pacific regions.Hence, there is an important gap in our knowledgeof how large-scale climate processes, such as theNorth Atlantic Oscillation and interactions betweenthe Westerlies and monsoons, affect such continentalregions.Important to the concept of climate changestudies are palaeoecological programmes to testmodels, to improve model parameterisation, and toplace these recent trends in climate variability into theperspective of longer time scales. In this context, LakeBaikal, located in southern Central Siberia, is one ofthe most exciting lakes for climate change research, asshown by successful international scientific effortsduring the last 15 years under umbrella programmessuch as the Baikal International Centre for EcologicalResearch (BICER), and the Baikal Drilling Project(Baikal Drilling Project BDP-96 (Leg II) members,1997; Grachev et al., 1997, 1998; Kuzmin et al., 2001;Kashiwaya, 2003)–ICDP Programme and IGBPPAGES–PANASH initiatives. Previous studies cover-ing glacial–interglacial time scales clearly show theorbital control on the sediment parameters revealingpronounced precession and eccentricity cyclicity(Colman et al., 1995; Williams et al., 1997, Kashi-waya et al., 2001). However, the Lake Baikalsedimentary archive also has the potential to sensi-tively record climate changes at high temporalresolution (decadal to centennial) over more recenttime scales. Despite the intense concern over theenvironmental and ecological impacts of anthropo-