60 years of scientific deep drilling in Colombia: the north Andean guide to the Quaternary

Abstract

We sketch the initial history of collecting deep cores in terrestrial and marine sedimentary basins and ice cores to study environmental and climate change. Subsequently, we focus on the development of long records from the Northern Andes. The 586 m long pollen record from ancient Lake Bogotá reflects the last 2.25 × 106 years with ∼ 1.2 kyr resolution, whereas the sediment core reflects almost the complete Quaternary. The 58 m long composite core from Lake Fúquene covers the last 284 ka with ∼ 60 years resolution. We address the various challenges and limitations of working with deep continental cores. For the tropics, the presence of these deep cores has made the Northern Andes a key area in developing and testing hypotheses in the fields of ecology, paleobiogeography, and climate change. We summarize the results in the figures, and for details on the paleoenvironmental reconstructions, we refer to the corresponding literature. We provide an overview of the literature on long continental records from all continents (see the Supplement). Based on our 50 years of experience in continental core drilling, developing a research capacity to analyze the large amounts of samples, and keeping a team together to publish the results, we listed suggestions in support of deep continental records aimed at studying environmental and climate change over long intervals of time.