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Climatic and volcanic forcing revealed in a 50,000-year diatom record from Lake Massoko, Tanzania

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Philip Barker ,
David Williamson ,
Françoise Gasse  and
Elisabeth Gibert
Philip Barker*
Affiliation:
Hysed, Department of Geography, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YB, UK
David Williamson
Affiliation:
CEREGE, Université Aix-Marseille III, 13545 Aix en Provence, France
Françoise Gasse
Affiliation:
CEREGE, Université Aix-Marseille III, 13545 Aix en Provence, France
Elisabeth Gibert
Affiliation:
Laboratoire d'Hydrologie et Géochimie Isotopique, Université Paris-Sud, Bâtiment 504, 91405 Orsay, France
*
*Corresponding author.E-mail address:p.barker@lancs.ac.uk (P. Barker).
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Abstract

The interactions between climatic and volcanic forcing on diatom communities contained in a 50,000-year sedimentary sequence from Lake Massoko, Tanzania, were examined. At the century scale, 19 discrete tephra inputs to the lake isolated the sedimentary nutrient supply and shifted the diatom communities to those tolerant of low phosphorus levels, whereas at the millennial scale, diatom-inferred shifts in precipitation–evaporation based on conductivity optima and diatom life-form ratios were broadly similar to lake-level reconstructions from Lake Rukwa, Lake Malawi, and others in the region. Some fluctuations of Lake Massoko are consistent with the precession-driven changes in insolation, but the major climate shifts do not relate directly to orbital forcing of summer insolation south of the equator and show more consistency with records from the equatorial and northern tropics that receive rainfall from the passing of the intertropical convergence zone. Sea surface temperatures are strongly correlated to multimillennial-scale climate patterns over this region of Africa.

Type
Research Article
Information
Quaternary Research , Volume 60 , Issue 3 , November 2003 , pp. 368 - 376
Copyright
University of Washington

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