Catastrophic outburst and tsunami flooding of Lake Baikal: U–Pb detrital zircon provenance study of the Palaeo-Manzurka megaflood sediments

V. Ivanov, Alexei; I. Demonterova, Elena; Z. Reznitskii, Leonid; G. Barash, Igor; G. Arzhannikov, Sergey; V. Arzhannikova, Anastasia; Hung, Chan-Hui; Chung, Sun-Lin; Iizuka, Yoshiyuki

doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.1488639

tigr_a_1064329_sm7041.pdf (188.53 kB)

Catastrophic outburst and tsunami flooding of Lake Baikal: U–Pb detrital zircon provenance study of the Palaeo-Manzurka megaflood sediments

journal contribution

posted on 2015-07-20, 00:00 authored by Alexei V. Ivanov, Elena I. Demonterova, Leonid Z. Reznitskii, Igor G. Barash, Sergey G. Arzhannikov, Anastasia V. Arzhannikova, Chan-Hui Hung, Sun-Lin Chung, Yoshiyuki Iizuka

Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater reservoir on Earth (~600 × 30 km in size and up to 1.6 km in depth), has more than 300 contributing rivers but only one N-trending outflow – River Angara. In the Pliocene or Pleistocene, another N-trending outflow operated through the Palaeo-Manzurka to Lena. Provenance analysis using U–Pb dating of detrital zircons from the Palaeo-Manzurka sediments demonstrates that the dominant source of the zircons was the lake deposits, while the contribution of zircons from local bedrocks was limited to about 8% only. Looking for an explanation of this, we propose a hypothesis that formation of the Palaeo-Manzurka sediments took place in association with a catastrophic mega-landslide (~15 × 3 km) into the lake and the resulting mega-tsunami flooding.