Drilling success summary May 2009

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Lake El'gygytgyn is an international effort designed to accomplish two goals:

1. To collect sediments from the largest and oldest unglaciated lake basin in the Arctic which represents the longest, most time continuous record of late Cenozoic Arctic climate evolution.

2. To collect meteorite impact rocks from a metavolcanic bedrock terrain that will inform us about uniqe aspects of the impact processes that might be found on other planets.

The primary objectives are to:

1. Understand the evolution of Arctic climate change from the warmth of the middle Pliocene ~ 3.6 Ma (at the time of impact) to the onset of Northern Hemisphere glaciation a million years later, at millennial scale resolution, for comparison with distal marine records and model inter-comparison efforts to test the forcing of this dramatic change.

2.Provide a long and unique time-continuous Arctic record capturing the style and dynamics of glacial/interglacial change over the duration of the “41 ka world” and late Cenozoic “100 ka world” for comparison with other long records from the N. Atlantic, N. Pacific, but especially the tropical oceans to evaluate teleconnections and leads and lags relative to insolation forcing.

3.Supply the science community with an understanding of the poorly documented regional sensitivity of the N E Asian Arctic to millennial-scale abrupt change (Heinrich and D/O scale) detected at global vs regional scales, especially over the last half million years, but also on the scale of the EPICA ice cores, long Asian loess and lake records, and comparable marine records.

4.Develop and integrate multi-proxy sedimentological and geochemical data with hydrological and regional-global scale modeling.

5. Engage the science community, as well as international public in arctic climate studies and scientific discovery in remote regions via educational and outreach opportunities.