The aim of this course is to give the students the understanding necessary to interpret environmental and paleoclimatic records obtained from lake sediments. Terrestrial records of climate change play an increasingly important role in climate science to test numerical climate model predictions, and to provide analogies for future environmental change. Lakes have several advantages over other terrestrial climate archives (such as e.g., speleothems, ice cores or tree rings): Lakes can be found on all continents and in most environments; lakes often have high accumulation rates - resulting in high-resolution archives; lakes are often present for tens of thousands of years, providing records reaching back to the last glacial maximum or beyond; lakes are relatively easy to access, and sampling costs are considerably lower than for marine records. However, despite all their advantages, lakes are also complex systems where the proxy records are influenced by factors unrelated to environmental change, such as lake formation and lake evolution. Therefore, to be able to properly interpret climate archives from lakes, we must understand how the lake system works and evolves over time. In this course, we will learn how lakes form, how different lake systems evolve over time, and how climatic and environmental changes are recorded in the lake archives can be interpreted.

The course includes a 3-to-4-day field trip to learn core sampling and lake surveying. The expected fee is NTD 5000.

***IMPORTANT***
-Please join the first class (Feb. 22, 10:20~12:10) if you are interested in the course. Once you are certain about enrolling in the course, we will collect the NTD 5000 fee for participation in the field trip.
-Also, interested students should send an email stating their motivation to join the course to Prof. Ludvig (ludvig@ntu.edu.tw) and cc TA Jill (b08203049@ntu.edu.tw) before Feb. 15 (Thu).