The Fredy & Nadine Herrmann

New research determent that the archaeological site of Ubeidiya in the Jordan Valley is dated to at least 1.9 million years ago, hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously thought. This means that early humans were already living in the Levant region at a very early stage in their expansion from Africa to the rest of the world.

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A new study published in Geophysical Research Letters presents a framework for predicting the thermal response of lakes to diurnal and annual cycles of environmental forcing—such as incoming radiation, wind speed, and air properties—and for evaluating how these responses may change under future climate conditions.

The study was led by Guy Tau, a PhD candidate at the Institute of Earth Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Geological Survey of Israel, together with Prof. Nadav  Lensky (Hebrew University & Geological Survey of Israel), Prof. Yehouda Enzel (Hebrew University), Dr. Vladimir Lyakhovsky (Geological Survey of Israel) and, in collaboration with Prof. Hamish McGowan from the University of Queensland, Australia.

Combining theoretical analysis with two years of direct eddy-covariance heat flux measurements from two adjacent lakes representing structural extremes—the deep, stratified Lake Kinneret and the shallow, mixed Agamon Hula Lake—the study developed new mathematical formulations to predict lake surface temperature and heat fluxes under cyclic environmental conditions.

These formulations were further applied to assess expected changes in surface temperature and evaporation rates in Eastern Mediterranean lakes under projected climate change scenarios, with crucial effects for water resource planning and ecosystem management in the face of climate change.

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