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Interdisciplinary investigations of a pristine alpine lake in Austria: The Lake Altaussee Monitoring Program (LAMP)
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The Lake Altaussee Monitoring Program (LAMP) investigates changes in this pristine Austrian alpine lake across geohydrology, biodiversity, and sediment records. Findings include evidence that lake water levels were up to 10 meters higher before 990 AD, that the lake is almost entirely karst-fed, and that submerged ancient trees reveal historic lake level changes driven by geological events.
• LAMP assess changes of the Altaussee alpine lake in geohydrology and in organismal communities facing climate change. • Lake water levels before AD 990 were up to 10 m higher, which changed due to a debris flow associated with heavy rainfall or a larger earthquake. • Lake Altaussee receives near totality of its water input from a huge karst system and is thus nearly independent of any surface flow. • Thousand-years old ancient trees are submerged standing up all over the lake bottom, as the result of a natural event still to identify. • This alpine ecosystem has been relatively stable across geological times, but with recent dramatic impacts from warming and microplastics. The oceans are well monitored for parameters that influence global weather events and that help forecast climate change. In contrast, such monitoring is not well developed for alpine lakes even though being sensitive ecosystems at the forefront of climate change impact. Here, we present the Lake Altaussee Monitoring Program (LAMP) which takes place in Styria, Austria. The monitoring was initiated in 2019, aims to be cross-disciplinary, and as of today develops along 7 major topics of interest. These topics cover hydrology, watershed science and water quality as well as geological formation and evolution of the lake ecosystem basin. LAMP takes place in a relatively remote and pristine area and thus is appropriate also to assess global pollution topics, especially related to microplastics, while also addressing response to fishes and ecosystem services, to climate change, and to global pollution pressure. This combination of geological history together with more recent and current changes, from climate to pollution, due to global growth of civilization can help tease apart the sources of change, being natural versus anthropogenic. In addition, LAMP can be used as a testbed to design or evaluate instrumentation, and to serve as an education tool for the local schools. Ultimately, these fundamental approaches of LAMP also are developed specifically to address the local community interest. LAMP is an open platform for monitoring asking for other experts to join the current team with complementary topics.
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A late Holocene Record of sediment dynamics obtained from Lake Altaussee (Salzkammergut, Austria).
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Researchers reconstructed sediment dynamics in Lake Altaussee in the Austrian Alps over the late Holocene using sediment cores, identifying natural and anthropogenic signals including the first appearance of microplastic particles in recent sediment layers. The presence of microplastics in sediment cores provides a dateable marker for the onset of modern plastic pollution.
Recent ecological change in ancient lakes
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This review examined ecological change in ancient lakes (those >100,000 years old), finding that all ancient lakes with available data show significant surface warming, with eutrophication, invasive species, and habitat degradation threatening both their unique biodiversity and their value as long-term environmental archives. The authors argue that despite their unusual resilience and longevity, ancient lakes are now facing human-induced stressors at unprecedented rates.
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