In the future, I’ll try to keep this blog updated with snippets of what I’ve been doing, or am currently working on.
In the meantime, here’s a few images from August 2019, when I was lucky to be able to join Dr. Ginnie Panizzo on her National Geographic funded expedition to Lake Linumunsut in Borneo. The lake is one of very few in Borneo that are not formed as oxbow lakes. It formed when a landslide blocked a river – local legend talks of a dragon that lives in the lake and holds back the water its tail. Nobody really knows how old it is, but estimates place it at a century or more – so its sediments potentially contain a wealth of palaeoenvironmental information. This could be useful for palaeoclimate studies (see this nice piece by Jamie Escobar and colleagues), but hopefully also for the management of the nearby Maliau Basin (‘Sabah’s Lost World) – a rare patch of pristine rainforest in a region otherwise heavily influenced by logging. We managed to collect some sediment cores from the lake, and they’re currently being dated and analysed by Ginnie in Nottingham – watch this space!
Patrick Frings 