Elsevier

Quaternary Science Reviews

Volume 102, 15 October 2014, Pages 149-165
Quaternary Science Reviews

Lithology of the long sediment record recovered by the ICDP Dead Sea Deep Drilling Project (DSDDP)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2014.08.013Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The first quasi-continuous ∼450 m record from the deep Dead Sea basin is presented.

  • The sediment profile covers two glacial–interglacial cycles including transitions.

  • The lithology of the sediments is exceptionally heterogeneous.

  • The Dead Sea sediments are a sensitive recorder of climatic changes.

Abstract

The sedimentary sections that were deposited from the Holocene Dead Sea and its Pleistocene precursors are excellent archives of the climatic, environmental and seismic history of the Levant region. Yet, most of the previous work has been carried out on sequences of lacustrine sediments exposed at the margins of the present-day Dead Sea, which were deposited only when the lake surface level rose above these terraces (e.g. during the Last Glacial period) and typically are discontinuous due to major lake level variations in the past. Continuous sedimentation can only be expected in the deepest part of the basin and, therefore, a deep drilling has been accomplished in the northern basin of the Dead Sea during winter of 2010–2011 within the Dead Sea Deep Drilling Project (DSDDP) in the framework of the ICDP program. Approximately 720 m of sediment cores have been retrieved from two deep and several short boreholes. The longest profile (5017-1), revealed at a water depth of ∼300 m, reaches 455 m below the lake floor (blf, i.e. to ∼1175 m below global mean sea level) and comprises approximately the last 220–240 ka. The record covers the upper part of the Amora (penultimate glacial), the Last Interglacial Samra, the Last Glacial Lisan and the Holocene Ze'elim Formations and, therewith, two entire glacial–interglacial cycles. Thereby, for the first time, consecutive sediments deposited during the MIS 6/5, 5/4 and 2/1 transitions were recovered from the Dead Sea basin, which are not represented in sediments outcropping on the present-day lake shores. In this paper, we present essential lithological data including continuous magnetic susceptibility and geochemical scanning data and the basic stratigraphy including first chronological data of the long profile (5017-1) from the deep basin. The results presented here (a) focus on the correlation of the deep basin deposits with main on-shore stratigraphic units, thus providing a unique comprehensive stratigraphic framework for regional paleoenvironmental reconstruction, and (b) highlight the outstanding potential of the Dead Sea deep sedimentary archive to record hydrological changes during interglacial, glacial and transitional intervals.

Introduction

The hypersaline and terminal Dead Sea is situated at the lowermost exposed place on Earth. It is located between the Mediterranean climate zone and the Sahara-Arabian desert belt. The location near the Sinai-Negev land bridge between Africa and Asia provides a key geographical setting along the pathway of humankind migration out of Africa. The lake occupies the Dead Sea basin (DSB), which is a pull-apart structure with steep escarpments to the east and west and flat extensions into the Arava and Jordan valleys to the south and north, respectively. During the Quaternary, the basin has been occupied by several different terminal water-bodies, which responded to hydro-climate conditions in their large watershed (e.g. Bentor, 1961, Neev and Emery, 1967, Begin et al., 1974, Stein et al., 1997). In consequence, the lake's composition, limnological structure and surface levels have strongly fluctuated through time resulting in pronounced changes in surface areas and served as proxies for past climate reconstructions. The maximum known N–S extent (>270 km) was achieved during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), when Lake Lisan extended northward over the Jordan and Beisan valleys and merged with the freshwater Sea of Galilee (Fig. 1b; e.g. Begin et al., 1974, Neev and Emery, 1995, Stein et al., 1997, Stein, 2001, Bartov et al., 2003).

The DSB and its infilling sediments offer the possibility to address a wide range of geoscientific challenges, spanning from seismicity and magnetism along the Dead Sea Transform fault to environmental and climatic reconstructions of the Levantine region. Already in the middle of the 19th century, the bathymetry of the lake was determined (Lynch, 1849), followed by first monitoring and drilling attempts and chemical analyses of the water body in the 1930s and 1940s (Niemi et al., 1997 and references therein). A pioneering step forward in Dead Sea research was achieved in the 1960s, when Neev and Emery (1967) conducted a comprehensive survey to sample and analyze the brine and sediments. In the last decades, Dead Sea research, summarized in Niemi et al. (1997) and Enzel et al. (2006), has been focused on sediments from the Amora, Samra, Lisan and Ze'elim Formations, which are currently exposed in the surroundings of the Dead Sea. These records mirror past hydro-climatic changes from glacial–interglacial scale down to seasonal resolution (e.g. Machlus et al., 2000, Bookman Ken-Tor et al., 2004, Haase-Schramm et al., 2004, Prasad et al., 2004, Migowski et al., 2006, Torfstein et al., 2009, Waldmann et al., 2009, Torfstein et al., 2013a, Torfstein et al., 2013b). Yet, these reconstructions are often interrupted by depositional gaps at times when lake levels rapidly decreased during dry periods and due to transgressive erosion during lake level rises (e.g. Bartov et al., 2007). Previous attempts to recover continuous sediment sequences from the present lake bottom were hampered by the presence of thick salt intervals and only short sequences covering the last few thousand years have been revealed (e.g. Heim et al., 1997, Ben-Avraham et al., 1999).

Through the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP), an international team of scientists aimed at recovering the past several glacial-interglacial cycles in a continuous high-resolution sediment core from the Dead Sea deep basin. Main research goals of the Dead Sea Deep Drilling Project (DSDDP) include reconstructing the environmental, climatic and tectonic history of the region, with high-resolution chronologies established by AMS radiocarbon and U-series dating (Stein et al., 2011), complemented by varve counting of selected sequences.

The main focus of this study is to document the lithology and stratigraphy of the 455 m long core from the northern deep DSB (site 5017-1, water depth of ∼300 m) and provide first insights into the exceptionally heterogeneous sediment succession proving the sensitivity of sediment deposition in the DSB to environmental and hydrological changes in the past. Together with ongoing efforts to construct a precise chronology for this sediment record, the data presented here will serve as a robust framework for all future, more detailed and high-resolution investigations. In addition, the new cores from the deep basin are tied to the stratigraphies reported from onshore environments as a first step for detailed comparison of shallow and deep water sedimentary environments.

Section snippets

The Late Neogene Dead Sea basin infill

During Late Neogene times Mediterranean Sea water entered the Jordan-Dead Sea tectonic depression possibly via the Jezreel Valley and formed the Sedom Lagoon (Zak, 1967, Belmaker et al., 2013). Long sequences of salt, intercalated by gypsum, anhydrite, dolomite and some detrital marl were deposited in the lagoon (Sedom Formation, e.g. Neev and Emery, 1967, Zak, 1967). The ingressing evaporated seawater interacted with the Cretaceous limestone that comprises the basin wall producing the

Regional setting

The Dead Sea occupies the deepest continental pull-apart basin of a series of structures along the Dead Sea Transform fault, which is an active left lateral tectonic system separating the Sinai and Arabian plates (Quennel, 1958, Garfunkel and Ben-Avraham, 1996 and references therein). The lake is located at the lowest exposed site on earth, with a current (2013) level of 427 m below mean sea level (bmsl). However, due to the intense utilization of water for irrigation and consumption purposes

Drilling campaign

Drilling in the deep northern Dead Sea basin was carried out with the Deep Lake Drilling System (DLDS) between November 2010 and March 2011 operated by the non-profit corporation DOSECC (Drilling, Observation and Sampling of the Earth's Continental Crust). The drill platform (Atlas Copco T3WDH) is a top-head-drive rotary rig. Two different drilling operations have been applied according to the expected lithology; (i) the rotating extended core bit (termed ‘Alien’) has been used for hard salt

The marl facies (aad, gd and ld)

Most of the sediments typifying the 5017-1 profile are mainly composed of packages of alternating aragonite and silty detritus of mm to cm scale (aad) and sequences of relatively homogeneous marl layers of thicknesses ranging mm to dm scale (ld facies: laminated detritus; Fig. 3a and b; see Table 3 and Fig. 3 for an overview of all described facies). The aad facies is made of ∼1 mm thick couplets of white aragonite laminae and dark marl laminae composed of calcite, quartz and clay minerals (

Lithology and sedimentary environments

Sediment sequences exposed in the marginal exposed terraces provide compelling evidence that sedimentation in the DSB is strongly influenced by the hydrological conditions in the large watershed that are reflected in the salinity of the lakes (e.g. Katz et al., 1977), their water-body configuration (e.g. layered or overturned; Stein et al., 1997, Lazar et al., 2014) and their surface level (e.g. Neev and Emery, 1995, Machlus et al., 2000, Bartov et al., 2002, Bookman Ken-Tor et al., 2004,

Potential of the deep Dead Sea record for future paleoclimate research

The ICDP drilling in the northern deep basin of the Dead Sea has recovered, for the first time, a quasi-continuous sediment record from the deep DSB for the last two glacial–interglacial cycles. The lithological profile of the ∼455 m long sediment sequence from the deepest part of the basin comprises four main sedimentary units (SU-I–SU-IV), thereby providing a firm stratigraphic framework to establish correlations with stratigraphic units and defined formations of the Dead Sea Group in the

Acknowledgments

We thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which improved the quality of the manuscript substantially. Funding by the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP), the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ, Potsdam), the German Science Foundation (DFG; grants FR 1672/2-1 and BR 2208/10-1), the Israel Science Foundation (ISF; Center of Excellence Grant #1736/11 to YE and ZBA) and the US National Science Foundation (NSF; grant EAR 11-15312) is

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