The southern Levant serves as the triple junction of Asia, Europe and Africa, and is located on the fringe of the Sahara Desert, making its regional hydro-climate extremely sensitive to even small global climate perturbations. This region further served as a major pathway for the migration “out of Africa” of fauna, flora and hominids throughout the Quaternary, as well as for the development of human culture. Spanning the length of the southern Levant is the Dead Sea Rift, which hosts the Dead Sea in the south and Lake Kinneret in the north. Seismic activity along the rift is a major hazard to infrastructure and human life, and together with future predictions of increased aridity over the coming century, superimposed over existing severe geopolitical strife, there is a critical need to identify and quantify climate change patterns, seismic risks to infrastructure and human life, and the overall ecological impacts of these processes on the environment.

Lake Kinneret (a.k.a. the Sea of Galilee) and its precursors deposited a thick sequence of lacustrine sediments since the late Neogene. Seismic profiles across the tectonically subsiding Cursi Basin in the middle of the lake, as well as existing sediment cores, indicate that the sedimentary sequences are flat-lying with no detectable disturbances, and are dominated by primary authigenic calcite, whose chemical and isotopic composition documents regional hydrology and lacustrine conditions since at least the Pliocene.

Accordingly, the Kinneret sedimentary record has the potential to serve as one of the longest, and highly resolved lacustrine records on Earth, yielding sub-centennial records of hydroclimate, paleoseismicity, geomagnetism, and pollen and paleo-botanics, in a region of central importance for the global understanding of climate change, tectonics, and human evolution.

The Lake KINneret Drilling (KIND) project aims to establish an exceptionally long and unique Pliocene-Quaternary chronostratigraphic reference record that will contribute to a meridional synthesis of continental and marine core records along the Afro-Syrian rift.