Lake Suigetsu 2006 Varved Sediment Core Project

The "Lake Suigetsu 2006 Varved Sediment Core" project, or "Suigetsu Varves 2006" for short, is a multi-national, collaborative research project based around a sediment core taken from Lake Suigetsu [soo-ee-get-soo], central Japan, in summer 2006. The two over-arching aims of the project are:

• to provide high and ultra-high resolution, quantitatively reconstructed palaeoenvironmental data for the East Asian monsoon region, coupled with an excellent chronology, across the last 150,000 years;
• and to establish a purely terrestrial radiocarbon (¹⁴C) calibration model across the Late Pleistocene (roughly 10,000 to 50,000 years before present), based on ¹⁴C dating of terrestrial material, free of marine reservoir effects, coupled with the independent chronology provided by varve counting of the annually laminated lacustrine sediment.

The project will therefore contribute to international scientific endeavour by using multi-proxy palaeoenvironmental data to determine the precise timings and rates of environmental changes, and in facilitating understanding of past changes in the global carbon cycle. It is further hoped that, through identification of independent tie-points to similarly well-constrained palaeoenvironmental datasets from geographically distant sites, spatial leads and lags in climate change across the global climate system will be identified.

Details of the situation and site of Lake Suigetsu can be found at:

• Location

A more thorough introduction to the SG06 sediment core, central to the "Suigetsu Varves 2006" project, is also provided:

• The SG06 sediment core