6 Integrating 20 Years of Scientific Drilling in the East African-Syrian Rift: A Session In Honor of Andrew Cohen, Part I

Continental drilling extending from the East African Rift into western Asia has yielded transformative discoveries, altering our understanding of paleoenvironments, paleoclimatology, paleoecology, and paleoanthropology. This session, in honor of Andrew Cohen, will celebrate these successes and define new directions.

Sunday, 19 October 2025
8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
HBGCC, 214A

From Desiccation to Rebirth: Unlocking Lake Victoria’s Dynamic Pleistocene History Through the Lake Victoria Drilling Project (LVDP)

Paper number: 6-5
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 9:20 AM – 9:35 AM

Authors

Abstract

Lake Victoria, bordered by Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya, is home to the largest human population surrounding any lake in the world and provides critical resources across eastern Africa. Lake Victoria is also the world’s largest tropical lake by surface area. Despite its size, the lake lacks a major riverine inlet and is relatively shallow for its large surface area, making it highly sensitive to hydroclimate variability. Its current size supports rich aquatic biodiversity, including the exceptionally diverse cichlid fish assemblage, and acts as a significant geographic barrier to terrestrial fauna movement across equatorial Africa. Given Lake Victoria’s importance to the eastern African region, its sensitivity to climate, and its influences on terrestrial and aquatic faunal evolution and dispersal, it is vital to understand the connection between the lake, regional climate, and how the lake size, shape, and depth has changed through its depositional history. The lake completely desiccated at least once in the late Pleistocene, and likely desiccated and refilled multiple times since it formed. These fluctuations in lake size provided a powerful, dynamic mechanism that forced major changes in the biota and ecosystems within and around the lake, including range expansion, contraction, and fragmentation, all key drivers of macroevolutionary change. These processes likely contributed to the dispersal of early populations of Homo sapiens across Africa and the formation and subsequent extinction of diverse large herbivore communities that once roamed an extended Serengeti-like ecosystem when the lake was dry. Pioneering work using piston cores has provided valuable insights on Lake Victoria’s during the Holocene, but relatively little is known about most of Lake Victoria’s history. Recent geophysical data suggest that sedimentary deposits beneath the lake may span the last 1 Myr, yet a continuous Quaternary sequence has not yet been recovered. The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) sponsored the Lake Victoria Drilling Project (LVDP) workshop in 2022 and supported the LVDP full drilling proposal in 2025. Here we present the culmination of work that led to the formation of the LVDP, the outcomes from the workshop, and the continued efforts towards future scientific drilling of Lake Victoria.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 57, No. 6

doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-412426

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