This course links lakes, their subsurface and their environment. It will be shown how lake sediments record past environmental changes (e.g. climate, human impact, and natural hazards). Emphasis is also given on the modern limnologic processes essential in interpreting the fossil record, with 3 day field course in the Dead Sea. Main points covered in the course:

• Understanding the role of lake sediments as archives of environmental change.

• Understanding the complexity of a lake system with all its connection to the environment.

• Understanding the role of lakes as archives and partly amplifier of natural hazard.

• Understanding lakes as an evolving element within a larger environmental system.

Topics:

1. Introduction to limnogeology: lakes as small oceans

2. Abiotic processes in lakes

3. Particle sedimentation and silisiclastic environments in lakes

4. Biological indicators in paleolimnology

5. The water column: aquatic physics

6. Geochemical processes in paleolimnology

7. Importance of laminations and varves in lake sediments

8. Hydrologically closed lake systems: their importance in paleoenvironmental reconstructions

9. Dating techniques in limnogeology

10. Basin analysis techniques in paleolimnology

11. Analytical systems in paleolimnological analyses

12. Lake sediments as proxies for climate change and anthropogenic impact

At the end of the course students will be able to:

• Being able to plan an own limnogeologic campaign, i.e. finding, recovering, analyzing and interpreting the sedimentary archives to solve a particular scientific question.

• Being able to link subaerial processes with subaquatic processes.