Ahead of its time: an interdisciplinary investigation of Lake Zurich's sediment fill (Zübo 80 project)

The 1970s were an exciting time to be a Quaternary scientist.The "ice ages" had long been recognised but still remained rather elusive; however, several new developments paved the way for our modern understanding of the recent geological past and of the Earth's climate system.As an example, radiocarbon dating (Libby, 1961) had become widely available and routinely applied, allowing us to add precise ages to past events.Oxygen-isotope variations in deep-sea sediments were identified as a consequence of episodic ice buildup at the poles, the latter as a consequence of orbital forcing (Hays et al., 1976), paving the way for high-resolution global climatostratigraphy.In the meantime, the first major international and interdisciplinary geoscientific research programmes had assembled, such as the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) that continued to explore the oceans and seafloors.This exploration has always been closely linked with seismic imaging, which had become powerful and widely available thanks to the universal accessibility of computing power (Allen, 1980).In essence, the time was right to think big and holistically, and to start planning similarly large ambitious interdisciplinary projects also onshore.