To improve climate projections and adaptation strategies to climate change and environmental stress, a better understanding of the past natural climate variability is crucial. In this respect, the IRONLAKE project aimed on developing a novel high-resolution technique; that is using iron isotopes of laminated lake sediments to infer changing redox conditions in lakes in relation to past climatic changes. Therefore, this project addressed two major concerns:
(1) The lack of highly resolved paleoclimate reconstructions: The report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stresses the importance of high-resolution palaeoclimate reconstructions that allow reducing the uncertainties of climate projections and advance climate adaptation strategies. Thereby, seasonally resolved climate archive data become more and more important as climate models improve. Annually laminated lake sediments are such invaluable climate archives, as these capture palaeoclimatic and -environmental information over long time-scales with up to seasonal resolution and provide important information about past abrupt climate changes, when human influence was minor or absent.
(2) Climate warming is expected to cause anoxic dead zones in lake ecosystems, leading to severe environmental problems, like the loss of fisheries and biodiversity, lower water quality, or the generation of cyanobacteria blooms. Besides temperature, wind-induced lake mixing as well as man-made eutrophication impact on the reducing-oxidising (redox) conditions in lakes, but disentangling natural and anthropogenic driving factors is difficult. This can only be overcome by searching for analogous situations in the past and deciphering the effects of climate warming on the redox state of lakes. Hence, a better understanding of the temperature-wind-anoxia link in lakes allows developing suitable adaptation strategies to environmental problems.
Only recently, first studies have hinted that variations in stable iron isotopes of marine and lake sediments reflect changing redox conditions in oceans and lakes, possibly linked to variations in past wind and/or temperature. The IRONLAKE project aimed on testing the hypothesis of a redox-climate-relationship mirrored in iron isotopes. Lago Fagnano (55°S Tierra del Fuego, Argentina/Chile) was selected as the ideal test archive for the project due to the remote location of the lake without human interference, its Fe-rich laminated sediments, and its proven sensitivity to record past changes in climate.
Within the IRONLAKE project, three main objectives were aimed to be achieved:
(1) Understanding the formation of Fe minerals and the cyclicity of Fe-rich laminae in lake sediments of Lago Fagnano and the relation to external forcing on changes of redox conditions.
(2) Applying the stable Fe isotope methodology to lake sediments to reconstruct changing redox conditions in Lago Fagnano.
(3) Developing Fe isotopes of laminated lake sediments as a proxy for past redox and climate variations.
The IRONLAKE project enabled a profound understanding of sedimentological processes in lakes and its relation to redox and climate conditions, and paved the way to a novel concept by testing Fe isotopes of lake sediments for climate reconstruction, which is highly relevant to better understand the past and adapt to the recent climate change, and, therewith, relevant for society.
