Reconstructing marine sedimentation rates in the Aegean Sea during the Holocene: Evi-dence for early anthropogenic environmental change?
Final Report Abstract
The question to what extent past cultures have altered their physical environment has raised considerable attention as a consequence of recent anthropogenic environmental change. Our project therefore aimed to decipher the potential influence of early human activity on sediment-deposition rates in fully marine, near-coastal settings of the Aegean Sea. The borderlands of the Aegean Sea are home to an exceptionally long, highly detailed record of prehistoric to historic cultures, which makes the region ideally suited for this research. Via the radiocarbon dating of planktonic foraminifers temporally highly resolved age models were generated for two sediment cores retrieved during R/V METEOR cruise M144 (Heraklion to Catania, 12/2017–01/2018) that allowed reconstruction of sedimentation rates throughout the middle and late Holocene. In core M144-5-6 (off Skopelos Island), maximum and minimum sedimentation rates amount to 0.13 and 0.03 cm/yr, respectively. Core M144-10-5 (off Lesbos Island) shows maximum and minimum sedimentation rates of 0.04 and 0.02 cm/yr, respectively. Changes in sediment-deposition rates are only very minor in both cores, thus allowing to refute the hypothesis that human activities may have caused a sedimentation-rate increase in fully marine settings of the Aegean Sea during the Holocene.
