Das Projekt "The Swiss contribution to the ICDP Lake Van Drilling Project: Linking modern seismic and biogeochemical signatures to 500,000 years of environmental history" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Eidgenössische Anstalt für Wasserversorgung, Abwasserreinigung und Gewässerschutz, Abteilung Wasserressourcen und Trinkwasser durchgeführt. This SNF proposal seeks funding for the continuation of the Swiss contribution to the Lake Van Drilling Project executed by the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP). Among other previous Swiss ICDP engagements, the Lake Van Drilling project was pivotal in triggering the newly established SNF-supported Swiss membership in ICDP. Further, the SNF Swiss contribution is a central building block of the entire ICDP PaleoVan initiative. Lake Van is the fourth-largest terminal lake in the world, extending 130 km WSW-ENE 1674 m above sea level on a high plateau in eastern Anatolia, Turkey. The lake is surrounded by active volcanoes within a tectonically active area and it is known to accumulate fluids emanating from the Earths mantle. The partly annually-laminated sedimentary record down to 220 m depth recovered from Lake Van during the ICDP PaleoVan drilling operations in 2010 has been shown to be an excellent palaeoclimate and palaeoenvironment archive. The continuous, high-resolution continental sequence, which covers several glacial-interglacial cycles (greater than 500 kyr), represents a unique possibility to investigate in detail the climatic, environmental, and volcanic changes that occurred in the Near East, the cradle of human civilization, during much of the Quaternary Period. Furthermore, the sediments contain an invaluable record of past earthquake activities, allowing the construction of a catalogue of prehistoric earthquakes and making it possible to study fluid transport in the continental crust that was triggered by seismic events. In this context, the societal vulnerability of the area to seismic hazards was dramatically documented by the occurrence of the devastating earthquake of magnitude 7.2 close to the city of Van on 23 October 2011 (hereafter referred to as the VE11 earthquake). This unfortunate and tragic event offers a unique opportunity to calibrate the past seismic events recorded in the sediments of Lake Van and the related emission of fluids from the solid earth to a modern seismic analogue. Sediment and fluid transport triggered by this major seismic event need to be quantified in order to calibrate the sedimentological record, which is targeted by the follow-up field campaign proposed within this project extension. The continuation of the Swiss initiative, embedded in the overarching ICDP drilling project on Lake Van, encompasses all the 5 initial research modules (A-E) of the ongoing SNF project (200021-124981). Within this proposal extension, the extended modules (A*-E*) will focus on key issues and new developments that expand the initial topics, with a special emphasis on the recent major earthquake VE11 and its biogeochemical and sedimentological implications. At the same time, this extension will also allow the results that have already been acquired to be further analysed and written up for publication by the project team. A large number of publications is foreseen. (...)