Towuti Drilling Project - TDP

26/06/2018

Congratulations go out to Ascelina Hasberg, who just published a new paper examining modern sedimentary processes in Lake Towuti. The lake occupies a geologically complicated terrain, and has a variety of internal geochemical processes that affect sedimentation in the lake. Ascelina's paper uses a large set of modern sediment samples to examine how these factors operate in the lake today, with an eye toward improving our understanding of the long drill cores. If you'd like to learn more, visit https://doi.org/10.1111/sed.12503

Sedimentology Volume 0, Issue ja Original Article Modern sedimentation processes in Lake Towuti, Indonesia, revealed by the composition of surface sediments Ascelina Katharina Maria hasberg Corresponding Author E-mail address:[email protected] Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, Univers...

11/05/2018

The Towuti Drilling Project just produced its second Ph.D.! Congratulations to Ascelina Hasberg, who earned her PhD from the University of Cologne investigating the sedimentology and paleoclimate record of TDP Site 2. This site receives a lot of sediment from the Mahalona River, and therefore provides a great record of the discharge history of that river and connections between the Malili Lakes through time. Well done Ascelina!

03/02/2018

After the workshop, the Towuti team had a great trip to Sorowako to see Lake Towuti. With so many new people working on the project, it was a great opportunity for everyone to learn more about the regional geology, animals, and plants. It was great to see the lake again, and to visit the Mata Buntu travertine waterfalls.

28/01/2018

We just wrapped up the 2nd annual Towuti Drilling Workshop, held in Makassar, Sulawesi. Thanks our hosts at Universitas Hasanuddin, we had a very productive meeting attended by 31 scientists focused on understanding the history of Lake Towuti. The age model for our cores is beginning to come together, and suggests the lake was established more than half a million years ago. This is old, but actually significantly younger than previous estimates. We are also beginning to recognize the extreme sensitivity of Lake Towuti to environmental changes. Although today Towuti is one of the least productive lakes on Earth, in the past it supported algal blooms lasting thousands of years, suggesting the lake can flip between different ecological states given enough nutrients. We made great progress on a host of issues, which all went well with meals of ikan bakar. We are now starting to assemble these results for publication: special Towuti volume, here we come.

22/12/2017

Congratulations to Tika Kirana, who just published her magnetic analyses of sediments from Lake Towuti! Find more at http://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S0031920117301541

Determining the age of sediments can be very difficult. Most of the mineral grains in sediment formed millions of years ago and were washed into a lake, or ocean, some time much later. We can use radiocarbon to determine the age of biological materials formed in the past ~50,000 years, but because of radioactive decay, beyond that the radiocarbon content is so low we can't measure it. For this reason many scientists use stratigraphic methods, such as paleomagnetic variations, to determine the age of sediment. This involves correlating magnetic fluctuations in a sediment with unknown age to an established magnetic stratigraphy. In her new paper, Tika evaluates magnetic signals Lake Towuti during the past ~60,000 years to develop a regional magenostratigraphy for the SE Asia region.

We observe a series of magnetic paleointensity excursions during the last 60 kyr, including the Laschamp excursion at 40 kyr BP, providing new information about the magnetic stratigraphy of the western tropical Pacific region.

02/09/2017

We had a great session on ancient lakes at the Southeast Asian Gateway Evolution meeting in Bogor with six presentations on Lake Towuti. Some of the highlights include new work by Rachel Simister and Sean Crowe that has obtained ancient DNA more than half a million years old! We are using the DNA to understand more about the evolution of Lake Towuti's organisms and ecology through time.

30/08/2017

We had a great visit with students and faculty at Universitas Hasanuddin in Makassar, which is building a strong new research center in Earth Sciences. We're looking forward to our next visit there in January 2018!

26/08/2017

Open lecture on Towuti Drilling Project.

20/08/2017

We will be at Universitas Hasanuddin in Makassar on 28 August to present results of the Towuti Drilling Project, hosted by Professor Imran. There will also be several presentations about the project at the Sage 2017 meeting in Bogor the same week. We hope you can attend.
http://sage2017.org/

21/06/2017

It is our pleasure to welcome Dr. Rebecca Hamilton to the Towuti Drilling Project. Rebecca is a paleoecologist who is counting fossil pollen in our cores to understand how and why Sulawesi's rainforests have changed through time. This work has lots of applications, including understanding the sensitivity of tropical forests to climate and improving prediction of how forests will respond to future climate change. You can learn more about Rebecca and her work at https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/hamilton-rx

Rebecca is a palaeoecologist with a background in geography and geology. Her current research is focused on decadal- to glacial- scale ecosystem and landscape reconstruction in tropical south-east Asia to assess long-term climate patterns for the region, and address questions of ecological resilienc...

19/06/2017

Anna-Sophie Springer and her colleagues have just published a new volume in the intercalations series, titled "Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago". The book is structured in the form of a curation exhibit, and features an interview with our very own Dr. Satrio Wicaksono and a set of images from the Towuti Drilling Project. Check it out at:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6yU-0EX-vpmRm5ycmJwdlhFcEU/view

07/03/2017

The photo at left shows where the Mahalona River enters Lake Towuti, carrying with it lots of red, iron-rich, highly weathered sediment eroded from the landscape. The image at right is definitely not Lake Towuti, but shows what Towuti might look like if we removed all of the water and dried out the landscape. Amazingly, the image at right is from the Gale Crater on Mars (courtesy of NASA), where the Curiosity Rover http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/ is currently analyzing ancient lake sediment. Although these places couldn't be more different, it turns out that the sediment in Lake Towuti is pretty similar to the sediment on Mars - both are made of similar minerals. In a new paper at the GSA Bulletin, former Brown grad student Tim Goudge analyzed the controls on Lake Towuti sediment and its relation to sediment on the red planet. See http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/content/early/2017/03/03/B31569.1.abstract
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170306114234.htm

14/01/2017

We have been very busy lately generating an array of new datasets, from work to understand the environmental history of the Malili Lakes to studies of the microbes living in the sediments in the lake. All of this work was presented by the project at a very successful project workshop in Bandung. We also have our first estimates of the age of the lake, and it is beginning to look as though our first estimates that Lake Towuti, as we know it today, is about 500,000 years old. More on this as work proceeds!

04/09/2016

It's the end of the first SEAGC, and we are already looking forward to the next one in Labuan Bajo. It's also the end of our trip to Bali (and nothing beats a Balinese sunset). We have had a very productive visit with colleagues here in Indonesia, and are planning our next trips to lakes on Sulawesi. We hope to see everyone before long at the Towuti Drilling Project workshop at Institut Teknologi Bandung in January, 2017.

01/09/2016

Several members of the Towuti Drilling Project presented their research at the Southeast Asia Conference on Geophysics yesterday. James Russell gave a keynote on the project and scientific drilling for paleoclimate in Indonesia, while Satria Bijaksana, Kartika Kirana, and Sylvia Fajar presented their work on magnetic signals of climate and paleomagnetism in Malili Lake sediments. Tika is developing methods for determining the age of Towuti sediments through magnetic paleointensity measurements, while Sylvia is investigating the processes that affect environmental magnetic signals in Lake Towuti and Matano. Gerald Tamuntuan, who earned his PhD working on Towuti, also presented his ongoing work on plate motion in North Sulawesi. It was a great day!

30/08/2016

We are leaving our "home away from home" at Hotel Mulia to attend the Southeast Asian Conference on Geophysics in Bali. There, we will have three presentations on the Lake Towuti Drilling Project by project scientists at ITB graduate students. We are looking forward to learning more about ongoing geophysical research in Indonesia!

Welcome to the 1st Southeast Asian Conference on Geophysics (SEACG), 31 August – 3 September 2016 in Bali, Indonesia. This year’s theme “Development of Geophysical Methods for Sustainable Energy and Environments” provides a venue for collaboration, sharing and developing new ideas and technologies. ...

27/08/2016

One of the most important goals of our project is to better understand the factors controlling the hydrological cycle in Indonesia: Where is water coming from, where is it going, and how much is moving around at different times? We can monitor the hydrological cycle today, but to reconstruct changes in the past we need tracers – singals that we can measure in geological samples – and one of the best tracers is the isotopic composition of water. Isotopes are atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons, which gives these isotopes different weights. In the case of water, both oxygen and hydrogen have multiple isotopes, and the water made of these different isotopes has different weights. Why does this matter? Well, a heavier water molecule will react differently than a light water molecule every time water ev***rates to become v***r or condenses into rainfall. Based on these changes we can use the isotopes to trace where Indonesian rainfall came from, how much fell, and what happened to it. To do this properly, though, we need to monitor how the isotopes of rainfall behave today. Below, our local collaborator, Sinyo Rio, does just that. Nearly every day for the past several years Sinyo has collected samples of rainwater for isotopic analysis from our Wawondula rainfall station. We're all deeply indebted to him, and really looking forward to seeing how this year's El Nino affected these data.

27/08/2016

And we're back! Satria Bijaksana and I are back at Lake Towuti for a few days to talk about the project with local community leaders, see old friends, and continue our environmental monitoring efforts (more about that later). After this, we head on to give presentations about the project in Bali and Singapore. It is good to be back, if only for a few days. In the photos below, the lake level has rebounded after falling substantially during this year's El Nino event, and Satria discusses recent changes on the lake with Pak Lorenz and our boat crew.