Large lake drilling projects supported by U.S. National Science Foundation Earth Systems History Program

The U.S. National Science Foundation’s Earth Systems History (ESH) Program, in cooperation with the International Continental Drilling Program (ICDP) and the national science foundations of international collaborators, has funded the drilling of several lacustrine basins that contain key continental archives of climate and tectonic history, including Great Salt Lake and Bear Lake (USA 2000), Lake Titicaca (Bolivia/ Peru 2001), Hvitarvatn/Hestvatn/ Huakadalsvaten (Iceland 2003), Lake Bosumtwi (Ghana 2004), Lake Malawi (Malawi 2005), Qinghai (China 2005), and Lake Péten Itzá (Guatemala 2006). These lake drilling projects mark the onset of what could become a systematic acquisition of continuous high-resolution records of continental climate change extending through multiple glacialinterglacial cycles. The projects are generating multi-proxy records of past temperature and hydrological change that can be placed in the context of the rich climatic history derived from the highly successful ocean and ice drilling programs. The ultimate goal of the lake drilling programs is not to confi rm the infl uence of large-scale boundary conditions on global climate, but rather to begin to delineate spatial and temporal deviations from the global mean on the continents where we live, providing important paleoclimate time series to test and improve our models and understanding of global climate dynamics. Below, we highlight science objectives and results to date from a few of these projects, many of which are still in the early stages of analysis.