Project Details
Projekt
The Chew Bahir Drilling Project: A Half-Million Year Climate Record from the Southern Ethiopian Rift, Crucible of Human Evolution
Subject Area
Palaeontology
Term
from 2013 to 2019
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 235790747
This proposal seeks continued funding toward partial costs for the analysis and interpretation of Pleistocene lacustrine sediments in East Africa, as part of the ICDP - approved Hominid Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP). The aim of the project is to retrieve and interpret long continuous sediment cores spanning critical intervals of human evolutionary history and environmental change, close to globally-significant hominin sites. This proposal focuses on one of the five chosen sites for HSPDP: Chew Bahir, a deep sedimentary basin in southern Ethiopia, where the deep drilling has been successfully completed in Nov-Dec 2014. Two overlapping sediment cores with a >85% recovery rate could be retrieved from the western part of the Chew Bahir basin and first results suggest that this covers the last 650-950 ka of climatic history. The subsequent first laboratory campaign in April 2015, showed that the sedimentary deposits seems to have sensitively recorded both changes in precipitation and evaporation, as well as provenance, transport mechanisms and diagenetic processes. In the next two years of the project, we propose a comprehensive geochemical and mineralogical analysis of the cored material paired with the interpretation of satellite borne remote sensing data. This will allow a reliable interpretation of the high-resolution geochemical scan and logg data on the one hand and the deciphering of the proxy formation processes on the other hand. On the basis of these standardized studies of the core, we will be able to reconstruct climatic transitions on orbital to decadal time scales, which allows us to test climate-evolution hypotheses relevant to human origins. The main objectives of the Chew Bahir deep drilling project are: To illuminate the role of climate change (timing, nature, abruptness, magnitude, and synchronicity of these shifts especially the transitions between Glacial and Interglacial) in the evolution of mammalian (including hominin taxa) during the Pleistocene.
DFG Programme
Infrastructure Priority Programmes
International Connection
Ethiopia
Cooperation Partner
Professor Dr. Asfawossen Asrat
