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Abrupt onset of carbonate deposition in Lake Kivu during the 1960s: response to recent environmental changes

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Abstract

This study interprets the recent history of Lake Kivu, a tropical lake in the East African Rift Valley. The current gross sedimentation was characterized from a moored sediment trap array deployed over 2 years. The past net sedimentation was investigated with three short cores from two different basins. Diatom assemblages from cores were interpreted as reflecting changes in mixing depth, surface salinity and nutrient availability. The contemporary sediment trap data indicate seasonal variability, governed by diatom blooms during the annual mixing in the dry season, similar to Lakes Malawi and Tanganyika. The ratio of settling fluxes to net sediment accumulation rates implies mineralization rates of 80–90% at the sediment-water interface. The sediment cores revealed an abrupt change ~40 years ago, when carbonate precipitation started. Since the 1960s, deep-water methane concentrations, nutrient fluxes and soil mineral inputs have increased considerably and diatom assemblages have altered. These modifications probably resulted from a combination of three factors, commonly altering lake systems: the introduction of a non-native fish species, eutrophication, and hydrological changes inducing greater upwelling. Both the fish introduction and increased rainfall occurred at the time when the onset of carbonate precipitation was observed, whereas catchment population growth accompanied by intensified land use increased the flux of soil minerals already since the early twentieth century due to more intense erosion.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Pascal Isumbisho and Boniface Kaningini for logistics in the Congo; Claudien Kabera, Jean-Népomuscène Namugize and Antoine Ntamavukiro for logistics in Rwanda. We specially thank Alfred Wüest, Mike Sturm, Maria Dittrich and Flavio Anselmetti for their scientific support. We would like to express gratitude to Christian Dinkel and Alois Zwyssig for handling the sediment cores; Ruth Stierli, Katrin Ehlert, Silvan Thüring, Judith Reutimann, Christina Keller for their help in chemical analyses; and Erwin Grieder and Jürg Beer for dating the cores. We would like to thank the Centre of Mineral Analysis from University of Lausanne, especially Prof. Hans-Rudolf Pfeifer and Jean-Claude Lavanchy. The project was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation under grant 207021-109710 (Nutrient cycling in Lake Kivu).

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  1. Keely Mills

    Present address: School of Science and Engineering, University of Ballarat, Ballarat, Victoria, 3353, Australia

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Surface Waters, Research and Management, Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, 6047, Kastanienbaum, Luzern, Switzerland

    Natacha Pasche & Bernhard Wehrli

  2. Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics, ETH, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, 8092, Zürich, Switzerland

    Natacha Pasche & Bernhard Wehrli

  3. Institut Supérieur Pédagogique, Bukavu, Democratic Republic of the Congo

    Georges Alunga & Fabrice Muvundja

  4. Department of Geography, Loughborough University, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU, UK

    Keely Mills & David B. Ryves

  5. Department of Surface Waters, Research and Management, Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, 6047, Kastanienbaum, Luzern, Switzerland

    Michael Schurter & Martin Schmid

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  1. Natacha Pasche
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Correspondence to Natacha Pasche.

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Pasche, N., Alunga, G., Mills, K. et al. Abrupt onset of carbonate deposition in Lake Kivu during the 1960s: response to recent environmental changes. J Paleolimnol 44, 931–946 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10933-010-9465-x

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