The Lake Victoria Drilling Project is focused on collecting the entire sedimentary sequence of Lake Victoria, a rich, unique archive of equatorial eastern African tectonic, climatic, and environmental change. Lake Victoria straddles the equator in a tectonic sag between the two rift valleys of eastern Africa. The lake is the largest in Africa by surface area and home to ~40 million people. Despite its large surface area, the lake is relatively shallow with an average depth ~40 m and maximum depth ~70 m. Despite the lake’s importance to the ecosystems, biota, and human populations of the region, the complete Quaternary record of Lake Victoria has not been collected, limiting our understanding of the depositional history of the lake, and regional patterns of tectonic, ecological, and climate change.

The Lake Victoria Drilling Project aims to capitalize on the dynamic nature and extent of Lake Victoria, as well as its tectonic and climatologically sensitive equatorial eastern African location by recovering the entire sedimentary record of Lake Victoria for the first time to address critical questions related to the region’s geology and geophysics, geochronology, paleoclimate and paleoenvironment, terrestrial paleontology and anthropology, aquatic evolutionary biology, and geomicrobiology.

Keywords: Africa, Tanzania, Lake Victoria, Paleoclimate, Paleoenvironment