Due to their age and their continuous record of sedimentation, the lacustrine sediments of Lake Tanganyika, East Africa, provide an excellent resource for paleoclimatic research. During an eight-day cruise in July of 2004, participants in the Nyanza Project collected four Kullenburg piston cores in the vicinity of the Kalya horst, a mid-lake topographic high located south of the Mahale Mountains. Thirty meters of core were recovered. Initial lithologic analysis of the cores revealed that they consist of massive silty clay beds alternating with laminated diatomaceous oozes. U-channel samples were collected from the cores in order to obtain a continuous record of paleomagnetic directions recorded by the sediments as well as an environmental record of changes in the composition and concentration of magnetic minerals. In conjunction with other techniques, the directional record will help to provide a chronology for the cores, which are thought to extend well into Marine Isotope Stage 3. This chronology will be used to place the evolution of the lake system and its sedimentary processes within the context of global climate variability. The environmental magnetic record will provide information about both large-scale and small-scale climatic variations. The paleomagnetic and environmental magnetic information obtained from these cores will make it possible to draw definitive conclusions about past climate variations, current atmospheric composition, and the present-day quality of the lake.

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