Welcome to our international conference on rapid sea-level change. While concern about sea-level rise is global, our host country the Islamic Republic of Iran and the neighbouring Caspian countries have a concern of their own. Here, Caspian sea level rose a hundred times as fast as in the world’s oceans. Whereas oceanic sealevel rose 13 centimeter during the whole twentieth century, the Caspian...

Concentrations of heavy metals were determined in muscles of Kutum (Rutilus frisii kutum) collected from the central part of the southern end of the Caspian Sea during February 2011. Except for silver (Ag) and nickel (Ni) which were below the limits of detection, the average levels of arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), copper (Co), chromium (Cr), copper (Cu), iron (Fe), manganese (Mn), lead (Pb), sele...

We present here the findings from a study of the microbiome of the southern basin of the Caspian Sea, the largest water body on Earth disconnected from any ocean and a brackish inland sea. By high-throughput metagenomics, we were able to reconstruct the genomes of representative microbes. The gross community structure (at the phylum level) was different from the structure of typical marine and ...

This paper is focused on the discussion of the exact age, and environmental setting of the ‘Khvalynian’ Transgression of the Caspian Sea with the use of novel radiometric, isotopic evidence and GIS-linked modelling. Based on this evidence the Khvalynian transgression is viewed as coeval with the warm Late Glacial episodes in the higher latitudes, reaching its peak at 13.6 11.8 ka. During that p...

Current taxonomy of western Eurasian trout leaves a number of questions open; it is not clear to what extent some species are distinct genetically and morphologically. The purpose of this paper was to explore phylogeography and species boundaries in freshwater and anadromous trout from the drainages of the Black and the Caspian Seas (Ponto-Caspian). We studied morphology and mitochondrial phylo...

Tides are the main type of sea level variability in the world oceans. However, oceanic tides penetrate weakly, or do not penetrate at all, into enclosed basins such as the Baltic, Black, and Caspian seas. Consequently, only directly forced tides are formed in these basins. Long observation time series (up to 123 years in the Baltic Sea and 38 years in the Black and Caspian seas) at numerous sta...

In the present study, the time series encompassing the years 1950-2011 of commercial landings from the Caspian Sea were analyzed using min/max autocorrelation factor analysis (MAFA) and dynamic factor analysis (DFA). These aim was to identify trends and explore the relationships between the response variables (annual landings of 10 species/groups such as kilkas, kutum, common carp, pike perch, ...

Remote measurements of different environmental parameters received during last 30 years are used for the synthesis of a Complex Simulation Model (CSM) describing the combined water regimes of the Aral-Caspian System (ACS) including the consideration of aquatic and climatic natural processes. The problem of stabilizing the sea levels of these two water bodies is modelled and a solution obtained ...