Historic Drilling at Nam Co Lake Provides New Insights into Paleoclimate

Historic Drilling at Nam Co Lake Provides New Insights into Paleoclimate
Image credit: Xinhuanet 

A significant breakthrough was achieved in the core drilling project at Nam Co, the world's highest saltwater lake located in southwest China's Xizang Autonomous Region. Scientists have hailed this as a landmark achievement in China's lake drilling and paleoclimate research.

The multinational scientific expedition team, including experts from Germany, Switzerland, Britain, and the United States, began their work in early June. On Friday at 06:35 p.m., the team successfully extracted a lake sediment core from a depth of 402.2 meters under the lake bed, surpassing the previous maximum depth of 153.44 meters on the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau.

Nam Co, situated at over 4,700 meters above sea level, is the second-largest lake in the region and an enclosed basin that collects data on rocks, soil, vegetation, rivers, and human activities. This makes it crucial for studying environmental changes. Wang Junbo, a leader of the expedition and a researcher at the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research (ITP), Chinese Academy of Sciences, emphasized that the lake sediment cores provide valuable insights into climate and environmental changes over the past million years, which can aid future climate forecasts.

Zhu Liping, another expedition leader and ITP researcher, highlighted that the drilling at Nam Co is the highest-altitude project under the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program. The collected cores will be scanned and permanently stored at the ITP for further analysis. Zhu noted that this breakthrough not only advances high-level research in China but also has significant international implications for scientific collaboration in lake drilling research.