Lake sediment studies in ice-free regions of East Antarctica - An Indian perspective

Antarctica plays a vital role in controlling Earth's climate. Recent data indicates that there are widespread changes in Antarctica, especially the Antarctic Peninsula due to global warming. Therefore collecting past climatic information from ice-cores, marine and lake sediments are extremely important as the data can be utilized in the available models to plausibly model the future climate for the region. Lake sediments are widely found in Schirmacher Oasis, Larsemann Hills and Vestfold Hills in East Antarctica. During the period 2010-2015, considerable amount of work has been done on surficial sediments, water samples from the sediment-water interface and sediment cores from lakes of these regions for different environmental applications, such as provenance, bacterial diversity and paleoclimatic studies. Techniques such as environmental magnetism, geochemistry (organic and inorganic), sedimentology, clay mineralogy, scanning electron microscopy and geochronology have been employed on these sediments to decipher the past climate and environmental changes on different time-scales and to understand the provenance of these sediments. Few paleoclimatic studies are limited to the Holocene whereas a couple of studies document glacial-interglacial climatic variations in Schirmacher Oasis. These studies have a much better chronological framework when compared to the earlier studies. However, there are still issues with the temporal resolution of the data when compared with ice-cores which offers much better sample resolution. It is therefore crucial that future studies on lake sediments from these regions be made on a high-resolution interval which will allow the researchers to have a good correlation with other archives such as ice-cores, etc.