Continental Scientific Drilling Facility

The deep sea (>200 m) is vast, covering 92.6% of the seafloor and largely unexplored. Imaging and sensor platforms capable of surviving the immense pressures at these depths are expensive and often engineered by individuals and institutions in affluent countries as unique, monolithic vehicles that require significant expertise and investment to build, operate, and maintain. Maka Niu was co-designed with a global community of deep-sea researchers. It is a low-cost, modular imaging and sensor platform that leverages off-the-shelf commodity hardware along with the efficiencies of mass production to decrease the price per unit and allow more communities to explore previously unseen regions of the deep ocean. Maka Niu combines a Raspberry Pi single-board computer, a Pi Camera Module V2, and a novel pressure housing and viewport combination capable of withstanding 1,500 m water depth. Other modules, including high-lumen LEDs, can be engineered to use the same battery charging and control system and form factor, allowing for an ever-increasing number of capabilities to be added to the system. After deployment, imagery and sensor data are wirelessly uploaded to Tator, an integrated media management and machine learning backend for automated analysis and classification. Maka Niu’s mobile mission programming and data management systems are designed to be user-friendly. Here, Maka Niu is described in detail along with data and imagery recorded from deployments around the world.

Abstract. As Earth's atmospheric temperatures and human populations increase, more people are becoming vulnerable to natural and human-induced disasters. This is particularly true in Central America, where the growing human population is experiencing climate extremes (droughts and floods), and the region is susceptible to geological hazards, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and environmental deterioration in many forms (soil erosion, lake eutrophication, heavy metal contamination, etc.). Instrumental and historical data from the region are insufficient to understand and document past hazards, a necessary first step for mitigating future risks. Long, continuous, well-resolved geological records can, however, provide a window into past climate and environmental changes that can be used to better predict future conditions in the region. The Lake Izabal Basin (LIB), in eastern Guatemala, contains the longest known continental records of tectonics, climate, and environmental change in the northern Neotropics. The basin is a pull-apart depression that developed along the North American and Caribbean plate boundary ∼ 12 Myr ago and contains > 4 km of sediment. The sedimentological archive in the LIB records the interplay among several Earth System processes. Consequently, exploration of sediments in the basin can provide key information concerning: (1) tectonic deformation and earthquake history along the plate boundary; (2) the timing and causes of volcanism from the Central American Volcanic Arc; and (3) hydroclimatic, ecologic, and geomicrobiological responses to different climate and environmental states. To evaluate the LIB as a potential site for scientific drilling, 65 scientists from 13 countries and 33 institutions met in Antigua, Guatemala, in August 2022 under the auspices of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) and the US National Science Foundation (NSF). Several working groups developed scientific questions and overarching hypotheses that could be addressed by drilling the LIB and identified optimal coring sites and instrumentation needed to achieve the project goals. The group also discussed logistical challenges and outreach opportunities. The project is not only an outstanding opportunity to improve our scientific understanding of seismotectonic, volcanic, paleoclimatic, paleoecologic, and paleobiologic processes that operate in the tropics of Central America, but it is also an opportunity to improve understanding of multiple geological hazards and communicate that knowledge to help increase the resilience of at-risk Central American communities.

Situated within a 1.07 million-year-old meteorite crater, Lake Bosumtwi in Ghana stands as a pivotal location for comprehending fluctuations in the hydro-climatic situation in sub-Sahara West Africa. The region is highly sensitive to climate oscillations due to the movements of the tropical rain belt driven by atmospheric circulation leading to pronounced dry or wet conditions on seasonal to orbital scales. Considering that climatic changes may trigger severe socio-economic crises in this area due to negative impacts on the agricultural sector- especially the cacao farming, a better understanding on the responses of the regional hydro-climatic situation to global warming tendencies is crucial. Recently a robust age-depth model was developed for the lacustrine sequence of Lake Bosumtwi, the only continental record spanning the last million years in West Africa. This provides the unique opportunity to gain detailed insights into the hydroclimatic situation. Yet, the natural gamma radiation (NGR) signal that we interpret as a proxy for terrestrial sediment input throughout the 300 m thick record, triggered by fluvial in wash from the crater rims, shows quasi-cyclic patterns. Based on this along with evidence from additional proxies, we discuss these patterns at Lake Bosumtwi and their relation to orbital forcing including fluctuations in the hydroclimate.