Noble gases and stable water isotopes recorded in groundwater can serve as proxies for past hydroclimate, which is of particular importance in arid regions. The new study by Roi Ram, an Israeli postdoc currently hosted at IUP, combines such data (in part from the IUP noble gas lab) with Kr-81 dating to obtain an unusually long paleoclimate record covering the past 400 kyr from the southeastern Mediterranean region.
This unique groundwater record, which complements records from other terrestrial archives, has been published in the journal "Science of the Total Environment". It provides information on the timing of past wet and dry periods as well as moisture source regions.
Reference:
Ram, R., E. M. Adar, Y. Yechieli, R. Yokochi, W. Aeschbach, M. Armon, D. K. Solomon, R. Purtschert, A. M. Seltzer, K. L. Urbach, M. Bishof, P. Mueller, J. C. Zappala, W. Jiang, Z.-T. Lu, and I. J. Reznik, 2024. Deep desert aquifers as an archive for Mid- to Late Pleistocene hydroclimate: An example from the southeastern Mediterranean. Sci. Total Environ. 951: 175737, doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.175737.
Picture: Graphical abstract.