Hidden within the vast Bolivian Altiplano are archives of past climate change in the form of remarkable carbonate rocks surrounding lakes long since disappeared. Beyond the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world, lies a relatively untouched realm of volcanoes and salt lakes. Ancient shorelines from intervals in the Altiplano history, when large lakes were more abundant, may hold important information about a time when the climate in this region was punctuated by much wetter phases before present day aridity took a hold. Previous studies in this region have reconstructed robust chronological timelines for such events and highlight two large lake phases over the last 18 thousand years (the Tauca and Coipasa lake phases); however higher resolution climate data are scarce. Current studies on climate proxies from smaller lakes in southern Bolivia may shed light on some of these higher resolution climate events including El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events. Laminated tufa found around the palaeoshorelines of the West Lípez Lakes is one such proxy, and can be analysed to investigate the potential roles of annual versus shorter‐term climatic variation in the evolving Altiplano climate at the time.
Not even Hollywood could dream of a place so magical as Kyushu. The southern‐most of the four major islands of the Japanese archipelago, this is a land of volcanoes, dinosaurs, and the last stand of the Samurai. And for good measure, James Bond visited here too, in the 1967 film You Only Live Twice. The final explosive scenes of that film featured the destruction of megalomaniac Ernst Stavro Blofeld's headquarters hidden inside the crater of one of Kyushu's most emblematic volcanoes, Shinmoedake. Kyushu also straddles the largest geological structure in Japan, the Median Tectonic Line (MTL) that runs from the western approaches of the island to the central part of Honshu. The MTL has been active since the Cretaceous, and the sedimentary basins formed along its line in Kyushu contain some of Japan's most famous dinosaur finds. The MTL also defines a fundamental divide between the geological histories of the terranes north and south of its line, a history that takes us back to the origins of the Japanese archipelago half a billion years ago.
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