(TibetanReview.net, Aug05’24) – An international research team has successfully drilled record boreholes in the world’s highest saltwater lake located in northern Tibet over Jun-Jul 2024 to collect sediment cores to study the Earth’s history, including climate change, dating back about a million years. Studying these may help future climate forecast efforts, reported uni-greifswald.de Aug 2 and China’s official Xinhua news agency Jul 13.
Lake Namco (Tibetan: Namtso) is around 100 metres deep and lies at an altitude of nearly 4718 metres in Nagchu city-prefecture. Almost 1400 metres were drilled under the supervision of physical geographer Prof Dr Torsten Haberzettl from the University of Greifswald. The longest borehole reached a depth of over 500 metres.
The Xinhua report said the Namco drillingsurpassed the previous maximum depth of 153.44 metres in lake drilling on the Tibetan Plateau.
Namco is an enclosed lake that gathers information about rocks, soil, vegetation, rivers and human activities in the catchment, making the lake significant for environmental-changes research, it cited Wang Junbo, one of the leaders of the scientific expedition team, as saying.
The greifswald.de report said the sediments that are now available from these boreholes will be analysed and evaluated in detail by numerous international scientists over the coming years. The researchers from Greifswald hope to gain numerous insights into the climate of the past, the development of life in such a remote region and changes in the Earth’s magnetic field.
Around 1400 metres of sediment cores were recovered from a floating drilling platform. These allow researchers to look back approximately one million years into Earth’s history. In order to obtain such information, the sediment cores are divided into small slices, which are then analysed in the researchers’ respective home laboratories – including in Greifswald, the report said.
The internationally funded drilling itself was stated to have mainly involved researchers from Germany, China, Switzerland and the UK, with the ideal drilling points determined in advance on the basis of seismic investigations funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, DFG). The scientists hope that their research will help to improve forecasts of the future climate.
“Global climate change will have a major impact on Southeast Asia and therefore also on the people who live here. It is thus important to understand the climate of the past in order to make models about the future development of the climate more reliable. The sediment cores reveal which climate changes occurred in this region in the past, how quickly they took place and whether they led to changes in the ecosystems,” Prof Haberzettl has explained.