The last 500 year of sedimentation in Shkodra Lake (Albania/Montenegro): paleoenvironmental evolution and potential for paleoseismicity studies

Lake Shkodra (northern Albania, southern Montenegro) is a large (45 km length, 15 km width) and shallow (5 m mean depth) lake, developed on a mainly karstic carbonate substratum. Its recent sedimentary fill (mixed calcareous/siliciclastic clayey silts) was analysed through short gravity cores representing five centuries of environmental archive. A combination of high resolution texture analysis (particle size), magnetic susceptibility, carbon content, and radionuclide activity profiles (210Pb, 137Cs, 241Am) permitted us to detect and date environmental changes, such as the Little Ice Age and the 1962–1963 catastrophic floods. Anthropogenic influences on the watershed, such as damming of the Drin River in the late 1970s, also appear to be recorded. Impacts of known strong earthquakes (1905, 1979), however, could not be clearly detected in the sediment record. The potential of the Shkodra lacustrine archive for paleoseismic investigations on long time intervals (such as Holocene) is discussed. This paper is a preliminary contribution to Shkodra Lake’s Holocene paleolimnology.