Homayoun Khoshravan¹ , Anahita Jabbari²

1. Head of environmental management group, the ministry of science, research and technology of Iran and associated professor of water research institute, ministry of Energy, Iran
2. Water engineering department, Urmia University, Iran
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Marine Science, 2015, Vol. 5, No. 31   doi: 10.5376/ijms.2015.05.0031
Received: 04 Apr., 2015    Accepted: 05 May, 2015    Published: 11 May, 2015

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Khoshravan and Jabbari, 2015, Reconstructing the past fluctuations of Urmia Lake, International Journal of Marine Science, Vol.5, No.31 1-6 (doi: 10.5376/ijms.2015.05.0031)

The aim of current study is to reconstruct the water level fluctuations of Urmia Lake during Pleistocene and Holocene. Evaluation of biostratigraphy evidences in sedimentary terraces and studying the sub bottom sediments sequences have illustrated that the water level of the lake was 45 meters higher, during upper Pleistocene, in comparison with the levels of its wet years at 1999, and also the lake area was twice bigger at that time. The main results show that the Urmia Lake was widely dried up in two steps, 4,000 and 12,000 years ago and the deserted environment was dominant. Also it has been obvious that the climatic changes effects during glacial and interglacial periods cause the biofacies variability of Quaternary sediments.

Urmia lake; Sediments; Fluctuation; Holocene; Drought