by Melissa A. Berke, Daniel J. Peppe, Ismael Aaron Kimirei, Christine S. Lane

The shallow, broad nature and large surface area to catchment size make Lake Victoria an extremely sensitive archive of past hydroclimate variability. Extensive prior work on Lake Victoria sediment cores, as well as on terrestrial outcrops within the surrounding watershed, have demonstrated that the size and extent of Lake Victoria is highly coupled to changes in precipitation, and the lake has likely desiccated and refilled multiple times in its approximately 400,000-year (~400 kyr) history. These fluctuations provide a powerful, dynamic mechanism driving intervals of range expansion, contraction, fragmentation, adaptation, and diversification for flora and fauna in the lake (e.g., cichlid fish), as well as the broader watershed, contributing to the dispersal of early populations of Homo sapiens across Africa and the formation and subsequent extinction of diverse communities of large-bodied herbivores that once roamed an extended Serengeti-like ecosystem. We propose a workshop to strategize a relatively low-cost sediment core recovery from Lake Victoria, containing a rich archive of equatorial African tectonic, climatic, and environmental change. Our goal is to recover the entire estimated ~400 kyr sedimentary sequence at Lake Victoria and integrate the lacustrine and terrestrial archives of deposition, climate, and biota with climate and hydrologic modeling of the region. The Lake Victoria Drilling Project (LVDP) will leverage decades of prior research at Lake Victoria, previously restricted to available Holocene lacustrine records and limited snapshots from existing outcrops.

• The main objectives from this drilling project include:
• 1) recovering the Pleistocene and Holocene sedimentary record of Lake Victoria, showing the dynamic nature of the lake including multiple lacustrine and paleosol sequences,
• 2) establishing the chronology of recovered sediments, including using extensive tephra fingerprinting from deposits in the region,
• 3) reconstructing past climate, environment, lacustrine conditions, and aquatic fauna, using an integrated multi-proxy approach, combined with climate and hydrologic modeling, and 4) connecting new records with existing sedimentary snapshots and outcropping fossils, tying archeological, paleontological, and sedimentological, tectonic, and volcanic findings to new results.

Africa, Lake Victoria, Paleoclimate, Paleoenvironment

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