This project in March 2014 became approved in the Priority Programme 1006 „ICDP“ of the DFG. It is part of the “Towuti Bundle” that consists of three funded DFG projects, which aim at providing important contributions to the overarching objectives of the ´Towuti Drilling Project´ in Indonesia. This international drilling project has received funding from the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) in 2013 and intents to drill three sites in Lake Towuti in spring 2015. Cpmplementary funding has already been approved by the US NSF in 2014.

The DFG project applies to the entire, ~130 m thick and presumably 650,000 years old lake sediment record that shall be drilled at ICDP Site 2 in the northern part of Lake Towuti, which is located on Sulawesi Island in the center of the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool. Complementary field work and multidisciplinary chronostratigraphical, sedimentological, geochemical, and mineralogical analyses shall be carried out on the core composite, in order (i) to contribute to the dating of the sediment record, (ii) to decipher the long-term development of Lake Towuti, with its formation and the onset of riverine input from other Malili lakes, (iii) to reconstruct the precipitation-controlled riverine inflow from the Mahalano River during the past ~80,000 years with up to decadal resolution, (iv) to identify the dimension and potential reasons for lake-level fluctuations in Towuti, (v) to provide input to the understanding of the variability in mixing and stratification of Towuti, and (vi) to contribute to the reconstruction of weathering conditions and soil erosion in the lake´s catchment. The project thus provides partly unique paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatological data that complement respective research by other international projects on Lake Towuti, and important background information for the associated biological projects