Grant: Special Research Opportunity Program - Project

PASADO Canada will constitute a significant Canadian participation in the study of paleoclimate and of maar-diatreme formation at Laguna Potrok Aike in the dry steppe of southern Patagonia, Argentina, through access to a ~ 400 m-long sequence cored under the framework of the International Continental Scientific Drilling program. The multidisciplinary Canadian team is composed of 13 researchers from eight institutions and universities across Canada. The international Potrok Aike Maar Lake Sediment Archive Drilling Project, lead by B. Zolitschka, Univ. Bremen, Germany, has over 60 international collaborators. The main contributions of the Canadian scientists to the larger research program are: (1) To undertake analysis of a long sediment sequence at low (millennial) resolution from the deep center basin to establish marine - ice core - terrestrial linkages focusing on the magnitude and abruptness of glacial/interglacial transitions, and periodicities of climate variability during glacial and interglacial periods. Results will also allow the evaluation of proxy-based hypotheses with Global Circulation Model climate simulations to establish mechanistic links between climate variability and forcing factors. (2) To study Marine Isotopic Stages 5e and 11 at high resolution, the best-preserved interglacial known to be warmer than the current Holocene. We will focus our efforts on reconstructing the hydrological conditions (salinity, recurrence and duration of droughts and floods) in high resolution (decadal to centennial). (3) To analyze the sediments that intersect the volcaniclastic deposits and the country rocks beyond the maar-diatreme wall to study volcanological processes in soft-country rocks, a situation similar to the Canadian Prairies. Understanding global circulation and how a warmer interglacial affects regional and global drought is of major interest for Canada for the development of policies to mitigate the effect of projected global warming.