BlackSea-RISE

The Black Sea is the world’s biggest semi-closed basin where numerous nations share its coastline with ~140 million inhabitants, most living in harbor cities, and exploit vast resources (fisheries, transportation, hydrocarbons, and recreation). The Black Sea is regarded as a fragile environment, susceptible to past and future environmental crisis.

We focus on the Quaternary sedimentary record of the Turkish-Bulgarian coast of the Black Sea, searching for clues on environmental changes, in contrast the connections between the Mediterranean-Marmara-Black Sea and Caspian realms. Our aim is to build up a relative/absolute sea level curve for the Black Sea for the late Pleistocene to reveal large scale environmental and landscape changes for a wide region.

BlackSea-RISE project is currently supported by TUBITAK-Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) bi-lateral program 220N053.

Scope

Prospection and conventional mapping of the coastal deposits (marine and fluvial terraces, aeolian deposits) along the ~750 km long focus coastal zone (Black Sea Coast of Turkey and Bulgaria) has been accompanied with precise measurement tools. Systematic absolute and model dating of these records by techniques focusing on inorganic (luminescence and U-series) and organic (radiocarbon and U-series) sediments is key for building a precise timeline of events and for correlation. The sedimentary records will be detailed by conventional sedimentological methods (grain size and shape analysis), by faunal assemblages and analytical (stable and radiogenic isotopes, trace elements) signatures.

The idea is to reveal:

Timing of the the relative/absolute levels (high stands) of the Black Sea during the late Pleistocene through the Holocene.
Characteristics of the depositional environment (e.g. salinity of the Black Sea)
Determine the differential rock uplift along the focus coastal zone.
Correlation with the neighboring regions and tectonic zones