Coring Three Lakes
Gygaia Projects
In the last week of October, a small group of Gygaia Projects team members took advantage of a new collaboration with Dr. Çetin Şenkul of Süleyman Demirel University (İsparta, Turkey) and his PhD students Mustafa Doğan and Yunus Bozkurt, to take sediment cores for paleoenvironmental analyses from three desiccated lakes in Manisa.
The first two of these – Yemişçigöl and Eğrigöl – dried up completely within recent memory, and at least the former had been a marshy wetland canalized already in late Ottoman times (for which subject see a forthcoming publication by Semih Çelik and Christina Luke which will be announced on this site when published).
Taking cores from the dried lakebed of Yemişçiğol
The recent tragic and full desiccation of Lake Marmara, as of August 2021, provided the third opportunity to collect sediment cores.
Several coring projects had already recovered and published core data from Lake Marmara, but – given the presence of water in the lake until recently – none used truck-mounted coring methods capable of penetrating hardened strata and preserving the long, continuous sediment columns essential for longitudinal paleoenvironmental analyses (sedimentology, palynology, etc.).
Coring at the northern (left) and southern (right) fringe of the lake basin in plowed lakebed being readied for agricultural reclamation.
We were grateful for the opportunity to collaborate and look forward to sharing results when possible!
Look forward to more posts from Gygaia Projects soon!