Under the auspices of the International Continental Drilling Program (ICDP), scientists have now undertaken deep drilling projects in a dozen different lakes on six continents. To date, there has not been a significant attempt to synthesize the collective results of these projects.

In this session we invite presentations from the involved scientists to discuss the major findings from each of these projects. We especially encourage scientists to take a synthetic perspective; to examine similarities between their records and those from other lakes or other paleoclimate archives; to show how their findings address large-scale problems in paleoclimatology; to discuss common, cross-cutting technological and scientific challenges inherent in deep lake drilling; and to pose major, challenging scientific questions that could potentially be answered from future lake drilling.