Saline Lakes

Inland saline waters are threatened worldwide by diversion and pollution of their inflows, introductions of exotic species and economic development of these ecologically valuable habitats. Since 1979 a series of international symposia on inland saline waters has served to strengthen and expand the scope of limnological research on inland saline waters. The seventh conference continued this tradition and the papers derived from the conference focused on the ecology of microbial communities, the influence of habitat geochemistry on biogeography of flora and fauna, physical and geochemical processes, and the conservation of inland saline waters. Of particular note are papers on Walker Lake, Nevada (USA), and the Salton Sea and Mono Lake, California (USA). Continued local, national and international efforts are required to inform the public and decision-makers about the environmental problems faced by saline waters. The papers in this volume will serve this end and should be of interest to aquatic ecologists, limnologists, aquaculturalists, and water resource managers.

Since 1956 the author has been making extensive and detailed investigations of saline lakes on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. On the basis of large amounts of reliable first-hand data and multidisciplinary analysis, the book deals with the temporal-spatial evolution of the plateau saline lakes and the prospects for inorganic salts and organic resources and their exploitation and protection, as well as the relationships between saline lakes and global changes. This book is the first English monograph on saline lakes on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau - the `Roof of the World'. Compared with books about saline lakes in other areas of the world, this monograph is written in a multidisciplinary, comprehensive and systematic way. It may be used by graduate students, teachers, researchers, field geologists and engineers as a reference book in research, teaching, etc.

Limnological research on saline lakes is practiced by a growing cadre of scientists active worldwide in a diversity of disciplines. Every three years since 1979, an international symposium on inland saline waters has served to strengthen and expand the scope of the studies. Promising areas for further research especially well suited to saline lakes include the comparative physiology of adaptation to osmotic stresses, the role of microbial and protozoan communities in nutrient dynamics and biotic interactions in ecosystems with few species. The Third International Symposium on Inland Saline Lakes was held at the University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya, under the auspices of the Societas Internationalis Limnologiae (SIL). The symposium was sponsored by and received financial or other support from the U.S. National Science Foundation (International Program), United Nations Environment Program, University of California, Santa Barbara, and University of Nairobi. The proceedings occurred for three days (28-31 August, 1985) and were attended by 33 scientists from 14 countries (see list of Participants). On the day prior to the first formal session an afternoon trip to Lake Magadi and salt works was held. The tribulations of this excursion served to acquaint the participants with each other and with the realities of exploring the African bush. A three day post-congress expedition to the rift valley included visits to spectacular saline lakes such as Nakuru and Bogoria. Much of the meeting's and excursion's success is owed to the efforts of the local organizer, Dr. Stephen G.

Proceedings of the IV International Symposium on Athalassic (Inland) Saline Lakes

The Vth International Symposium on Inland Saline Lakes was held at Hotel Titikaka on the shores of that lake, 22--29 March 1991 with participants from 16 countries. Twenty-three papers presented by the participants, plus an additional one reporting a microcosm study on salinity effects, constitute the present volume. The papers cover the wide array of subject matters and scales characteristic of our `interdiscipline' and represent the symposium well. All manuscripts submitted for these proceedings were critically reviewed by at least three referees and are representative of saline lake research, developed around the world in the three-year period since the last symposium.

'With Hammer's book as a guide, major gaps in our understanding of saline lakes become clear and research opportunities become apparent.' Ecology, 68 (1987)

This text, written by a leading researcher in the field, describes the origin and formation of lakes in order to give context to the question of how lacustrine deposits form. It explains the process of sedimentation in lakes and the chemistry of those deposits and describes how the age of lake deposits are determined. Additionally, this book shows how different groups of fossils are used in interpreting the paleontological record of lakes. In order to illustrate the more synthetic approaches to interpreting the history of lakes, the author also discusses such special topics as lake-level history, lake evolution, and the impact of environmental change on lakes.

This book provides an overview of lakes in Mongolia from scientific, economic and scenic points of view, presenting lake area changes, their sedimentological and geochemical characteristics, valuable economic and geoheritage resources and paleoclimate change reconstruction. The book emphasizes internationally well-known lakes of Mongolia, but it also describes far less popular lakes which have remained unrecognized for scientific importance. The book offers modern, qualitative, process-oriented approaches and quantitative analytic results-based implications to understand the geomorphological, sedimentological and geochemical evolution of lake basins in Mongolia, and past and present climate changes in Mongolia and Eurasia. Insights into the interpretation of data obtained from the lake basins in the fields of geomorphology, sedimentology, geochemistry, geochronology and paleoclimatology are developed from theoretical principles, empirical observations, correlative illustrations, analytic measurements and conscious hypotheses. Based on the application of a combined compilation of recent Landsat 8 images of the lakes and topographic maps of them in 1970, this book presents enriched results and implications derived from remote sensing together with field measurements and laboratory analyses. This data compilation belongs to a research team at the Laboratory of Geochemistry and Geomorphology (LGG), National University of Mongolia (NUM).