Age, Palaeoenvironments, and Climatic Significance of Late Pleistocene Konya Lake, Turkey

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Abstract
The Konya Basin, a closed depression at the southern margin of the Anatolian Plateau, contained a shallow but extensive lake during the late Quaternary. Nearshore sands and gravels containingDreissenashells form prominent depositional terraces around the basin edges at elevations between 1005 and 1020 m, and the highest has been dated at more than 30,000 yr B.P. The last major phase of limnic sedimentation occurred between 23,000 and 17,000 yr B.P., after which the lake fragmented into a number of subbasins or secondary depressions which evolved to become either marshes or playas. A final expansion of these residual lakes has been dated to ca. 11,000 yr B.P. in one secondary depression. Archaeological and other evidence indicate that only minor lake-level fluctuations occurred during the Holocene. The dominant sedimentary process over the last 10,000 years has been alluviation at the basin margin. The Konya sequence confirms that the most recent period of high-lake levels in the northern Near East was of the last glacial age. The palaeolakes of Anatolia and Iran were, however, more a product of reduced evaporation brought about by temperature depression than of changes in precipitation, and thus belie their often-used description as an indicator of “pluvial” climatic conditions.