Geochronology of the coastal record to understand transgression-regression episodes of the Black Sea

Описание: Cenieh Seminar: Geochronology of the coastal record to understand transgression-regression episodes of the Black Sea for the last 125,000 by Prof. Mehmet Korhan Erturaç (Institute of Earth and Marine Sciences, Gebze Technical University, Kocaeli.)

The Black Sea is currently a nearly enclosed basin connected to the Mediterranean via the Bosphorus Strait (sill depth at 35 m bsl), the Marmara Sea, and the Dardanelles (65 m bsl). During the last glacial period, this connection was severed due to global sea level drop, falling lower than the sill depths. While the early Holocene reconnection of the Black Sea to the Mediterranean has been extensively studied and debated, our understanding of the Black Seas Sea level curve during the last glacial period (the last 125.000 years) still remains largely rooted in foundational research. This lack of information restricts background environmental reconstructions, especially for mammal (Hominin) dispersal patterns.

A multiyear bi-lateral program, namely BlackSea-Rise has been carried on along the Black Sea Coastal Zone supported by the TUBITAK (GTU) and BAS (220N053) with support from AU (OSL), CENIEH (U-series), METU (Isotope Measurements). The goal of the project is to investigate the late Pleistocene coastal record to reveal the past-sea level, environmental changes and determine the differential uplift along the 1200 km coastline between Sinop (Türkiye) and Varna (Bulgaria). After 3 years of intense field and laboratory work, the BlackSea-Rise program enabled us to thoroughly inspect the nature of exposed uplifted coastal record (fossil beach and dune) and produced over 100 absolute age determinations (luminescence, radiocarbon and U series), grain size characterization of sediments, identification of mollusc fauna and stable -radiogenic isotopes at 16 distinct focus sites.
This space-time dataset is used to reconstruct the relative sea-level curve of the Black Sea and the explore the nature of the five past transgressions for the late Pleistocene-Holocene.