Sayan Mountains Expedition

The expedition aimed to provide data to better understand past climatic conditions in the region using chironomids, diatoms and spheroidal carbonaceous particles. This required the extraction of two cores from four lakes in the range. After arriving at their designated field site from Khoito-Gol, the team set about sampling Lakes Kascadnoe-1 and Khikushka over three days. They were unable to sample further lakes after the weather closed in and one team member fell ill. Conditions on the approach to another intended site, Lake Shas-Nur, meant circumnavigating large areas of bog that added five hours to the journey, and in the remaining daylight left there was not enough time to suitably sample the lake. To ensure enough samples were gathered, an additional core was extracted from Kascadnoe-1. The samples were prepared at The Institute of Geochemistry in Irkutsk upon the expedition’s return. Further processing and analysis will take place at Newcastle University.