Bhakti Shah

Climate Development in the Pleistocene to Holocene in the Red Sea

The Red Sea is a semi-enclosed, longitudinally spread basin located within the subtropical zone, having an arid-humid climate. It is connected towards the North by the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba to the Mediterranean Sea and towards the South by the Bab-al-Mandeb to the Pacific Ocean. Due to its physiographic features, the Red Sea remains isolated from the large current systems with a higher rate of loss of water through evaporation and little mixing. This makes the Red Sea water more saline the most of the large open water bodies. Located in the Saharo-Arabain desert region, the Red Sea portrays as a crucial area for paleoclimate and palaeoceanographic studies. Detailed studies of the Mediterranean Sea and the reconstruction of climate for the past 1Ma have been accomplished. However, a clear picture of the arid and humid phases transitions and their correlation with the Glacial and Interglacial periods have not been well understood for the Northern Red Sea. Thus, this project caters to understanding and studying the climatic and environmental shifts related to the dry-humid phases in the Red Sea since the Late Pliocene.

The Project is part of the cluster's Research Unit RECORDER that deciphers climate signals from marine sediments. For this project, three sediment cores are planned to be analyzed for proxies for seawater parameters and for aridity. A multiple proxy method is designed to achieve the objectives, which incorporate coccolithophore assemblage and benthic foraminiferal assemblage studies along with dust mineralogy and grain size analysis. Analysis of coccolithophore and foraminifera assemblages will provide information on past environmental conditions and changes. In addition, the results of the mineralogical and sedimentological analysis of the dust will help infer the source and supply of dust, as well as a potential influence on productivity from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene. The sediment cores were collected from the North of the Red Sea, off Umluj, Saudi Arabia.

The project is funded by the DFG Cluster of Excellence ‘The Ocean Floor – Earth Uncharted Interface’ led by the University of Bremen (MARUM). This project is a collaboration with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) at Thuwal, Saudi Arabia.