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The last 500 year of sedimentation in Shkodra Lake (Albania/Montenegro): paleoenvironmental evolution and potential for paleoseismicity studies

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Abstract

Lake Shkodra (northern Albania, southern Montenegro) is a large (45 km length, 15 km width) and shallow (5 m mean depth) lake, developed on a mainly karstic carbonate substratum. Its recent sedimentary fill (mixed calcareous/siliciclastic clayey silts) was analysed through short gravity cores representing five centuries of environmental archive. A combination of high resolution texture analysis (particle size), magnetic susceptibility, carbon content, and radionuclide activity profiles (210Pb, 137Cs, 241Am) permitted us to detect and date environmental changes, such as the Little Ice Age and the 1962–1963 catastrophic floods. Anthropogenic influences on the watershed, such as damming of the Drin River in the late 1970s, also appear to be recorded. Impacts of known strong earthquakes (1905, 1979), however, could not be clearly detected in the sediment record. The potential of the Shkodra lacustrine archive for paleoseismic investigations on long time intervals (such as Holocene) is discussed. This paper is a preliminary contribution to Shkodra Lake’s Holocene paleolimnology.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to the Albanian people in Shiroké Village who helped with the coring of Lake Shkodra. We are grateful to researchers and technical staff from the Seismological Institute of Albania and Science Academy of Tirana. We thank B. Mourier and technical staff of CARRTEL Laboratory (University of Savoie) for advice with the LOI procedure. We also thank Dr. Mark Brenner, Pr. John P. Smol and an anonymous reviewer for useful comments that greatly improved the manuscript. This work was partly funded by the NATO Science for Peace Project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire de Géodynamique des Chaînes Alpines, U.M.R. C.N.R.S. 5025, Université de Savoie, 73 376, Le Bourget du Lac cedex, France

    Aurélien van Welden, Christian Beck, François Jouanne & Jean-Louis Mugnier

  2. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, U.M.R. C.N.R.S./C.E.A., 91 191, Gif sur Yvette, France

    Jean-Louis Reyss

  3. Academy of Sciences, Sheshi Fan S. Noli , Nr. 4, Tirana, Albania

    Salvatore Bushati

  4. Institute of Seismology, Tirana, Albania

    Rexhep Koci

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  1. Aurélien van Welden
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  2. Christian Beck
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Correspondence to Aurélien van Welden.

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van Welden, A., Beck, C., Reyss, JL. et al. The last 500 year of sedimentation in Shkodra Lake (Albania/Montenegro): paleoenvironmental evolution and potential for paleoseismicity studies. J Paleolimnol 40, 619–633 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10933-007-9186-y

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