Drilling Projects By
Climate & Ecosystems
Sustainable Georesources
Natural Hazards
World
Geological Time
Asia
- Maps of Asia
- Boso Peninsula (Japan)
- Chelungpu (Taiwan)
- Dead Sea (Israel)
- Donghai (China)
- Hanoi (Vietnam)
- Koyna (India)
- Lake Baikal (Russia)
- Lake Biwa (Japan)
- Lake El'gygytgyn (Russia)
- Lake Issyk-Kul (Kyrgyzstan)
- Lake Nam Co (China)
- Lake Qinghai (China)
- Lake Towuti (Indonesia)
- Lake Van (Turkey)
- Mutnovsky Volcano (Russia)
- Nankai Trough (Japan)
- NE Japan
- North Anatolian Fault (Turkey)
- Oman
- Ryukyu Islands (Japan)
- Songliao Basin (China)
- Songliao - MW-DUL (China)
- Unzen Volcano (Japan)
- Yangtze Craton (China)
Lake Towuti Drilling Project (TOWUTI)
Paleoenvironments, Biological Evolution, and Geomicrobiology of a Tropical Pacific Lake
Lake Towuti’s location in central Indonesia provides an important opportunity to reconstruct long-term terrestrial paleoclimate change in a crucially important yet understudied region- the Western Pacific warm pool, heart of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. Lake Towuti has high rates of floral and faunal endemism and is surrounded by one of the most diverse tropical forests on Earth making it a hotspot of Sotheast Asian biodiversity. The ultramafic (ophiolitic) rocks and lateritic soils surrounding Lake Towuti provide ferruginous metal substrates that feed a diverse, exotic microbial community in the lake and its sediments, potentially analogous to the microbial ecosystems that operated in the Archean Oceans and on Mars. The Towuti Drilling Program will provide valuable new information to understand the climate, biological, and geomicrobiological evolution of this unique system.
