The coring campaign within the scope of the project took 63 days in total, and 34 piston cores each having length of ca 3.5 meters were collected from the lagoonal systems. Since lagoons are shallow and highly dynamic depositional environments, multi-core interpretations are crucial to check basinwide extent of sedimentary events so that local and micro sedimentary processes like sediment focusing and post-depositional diagenesis as well as coring disturbances can be ruled out. Along the cores, total of 80 meters of ITRAX micro-XRF scanning was done at 1 mm resolution. The U-channel radiography method, which uses thin sediment slabs rather than half core sections like in conventional radiography, was used to better reveal mm-scale sedimentary structures. Total of 31 radiocarbon dating were done to understand the chronology of the sedimentary sequences recovered during the project.
Normalization of element profiles like Ti, Fe, K and Zn by Ca is used to evaluate the changes in the balance between terrestrial clastic deposition and deposition of bio/chemical CaCO3 from water column. In all of the target sites of the project, Ca-normalized profiles show anomalies temporally correlating with the historical tsunamis in the eastern Mediterranean. This kind of geochemical trace is attributed to sudden increase in the amount of terrigenous sediment into the lagoons, which is swept from the sand spits of the lagoons due to marine overwash during tsunamis. During relatively sudden deposition of these clastics, there would be no time for bio/chemical CaCO3 precipitation from the water column that would result in a Ca-depleted intercalation within the background sedimentation. Above-mentioned geochemical fingerprints of tsunamis are relatively distinct compared to the physical sedimentary traces observed along u-channel radiographs. Catastrophic tsunamis are expected to transport significant amounts of coarse sediment and macro fossils from near-shore environment and sand barriers of the lagoon. However, this is not the case for the lagoons investigated within the scope of the project, because no obvious physical changes that are distinctly different from the background sedimentation were observed along the radiographs. It is probably because coarse-grained tsunami deposits could not reach to the coring locations, which are approximately 500 meters away from the sand barriers of the lagoons. Instead, only fine-grained sediment cloud could be transported to the coring locations, which can still be geochemically detected.
