Recent advances in global lake coring hold promise for global change research in paleolimnology

Abstract

Thank you, Antje, for your generous comments and I thank IPA for presenting me with this award along with three giants of paleolimnology! I am humbled and delighted to accept this award as a representative of all those in the Paleolimnology community whose creative insights continue to make Paleolimnology inspiring. As all paleolimnologists know, the key to any paleolimnology study starts with obtaining a good core. To that end, it is significant that all paleolimnlogists owe a debt of gratitude to two men being honored here today, Dan Livingstone and Herb Wright. Because most paleolimnology studies are interested in Holocene records, the Livingstone piston corer and the square-rod modified versions are adequate for this purpose. These devices have been the main weapons in paleolimnological research, obtaining cores of up to 20 m long—if you’re lucky. Because I have one foot in paleolimnology and one foot in paleoceanography, I have also had to rely on another piston corer, modifications of the Swedish Kullenberg piston corer, also obtaining cores of up to 20 m long—if you’re lucky, perhaps going back tens of thousands of years. The dominant archive of Quaternary paleoceanographic records resides in cores taken daily for years by Lamont Doherty’s ships Vema and Robert Conrad all over the world. To get longer records, the paleoceanographic community solved the problem in 1968 with the Glomar Challenger and the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP), and later the Joides Resolution and the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP), obtaining records going back to the Jurassic using rotary drilling. Unfortunately this made soup of Quaternary records. I have been involved with a number of lake drilling projects using rotary drilling rigs with the same results; we would get great Miocene records, but lousy Quaternary records. The Paleoceanography community solved this problem in 1978 with the hydraulic piston corer. In 1978 I was at a post-cruise DSDP meeting at Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA. Kerry Kelts, then still a graduate student at Zurich, but on loan to DSDP as a staff representative, had just gotten off the Glomar Challenger after having taken the first hydraulic piston core at Site 480 in the Gulf of California. Drinking beer at a TGIF at Scripps, Kerry and I talked about this and asked ourselves, ‘‘when are we going to have that capability for lakes?’’ Kerry, along with Steve Colman and others, started the ball rolling over the next couple decades. Engineering expertise was sought from Drilling Observation and Sampling of the Earth’s Continental The author was the recipient of a ‘‘Lifetime Achievement Award’’ presented by the International Paleolimnology Association (IPA) in Guadalajara, Mexico on 16 December 2009.