The southern Levant serves as the triple junction of Asia, Europe and Africa, and is located on the fringe of the Sahara Desert, making its regional hydro-climate extremely sensitive to even small global climate perturbations. In addition, this region has served as a major pathway for the migration “out of Africa” of fauna, flora and hominids throughout the Quaternary, as well as for the development of human culture. Spanning the length of the southern Levant is the Dead Sea Rift, which hosts the Dead Sea in the south and Lake Kinneret in the north. Seismic activity along the rift is a major hazard to infrastructure and human life, and together with future predictions of increased aridity over the coming century, superimposed over existing severe geopolitical strife, there is a critical need to identify and quantify climate change patterns, seismic risks to infrastructure and human life, and the overall ecological impacts of these processes on the environment.

The Kinneret sedimentary sequence has the potential to serve as one of the longest, and highly resolved lacustrine records on Earth, which is particularly important due to the relevance of this site to:

1. High resolution reconstruction of Pliocene-Quaternary hydro-climate history of the Levant and East Mediterranean, which is considered a major hot spot of projected climate warming
2. Evaluation of the impacts of climate change on human history and regional ecology
3. Reconstruction of seismic activity along the Dead Sea Rift since the Pliocene

Keywords: Asia, Israel, Paleoclimate, Paleoseismicity, Paleomagnetism, Dead Sea Rift, Human evolution