Hala Lake is a deep enclosed alpine lake in NE Tibetan Plateau which is in the transitional zone of the Asian Summer Monsoon and the westerlies.Continuous sediments preserved in this lake provide excellent materials for reconstructing regional environmental and climatic changes.However,a systematic knowledge on the sedimentary elements in this lake is still lacking due to few studies have been done.Here we present a multivariate statistical analysis on geochemical elements of Core HL13D from HalaLake byhigh-resolution XRF scanning.Correlation analysis,cluster analysis and discriminant factor analysis were applied to the elements to reveal the geochemical significance of Ti,K,Si,Al,Fe,Mn,Ca,Sr,Zr and Cl elements preserved in the core.Results suggest that Ti,K,Si,Al,Fe and Mn elements have the same variations with a high correlation,representing the terrigenous clasts input and reflecting the watershed hydrology,such as the volume of runoff controlled by regional precipitation or snow melt from the high altitudes around the lake.Elements Sr,Zr and Ca have significant correlations,and Ca has nearly the same loading in the first and the second principle component (runoff and wind),indicating that coarse terrigenous clasts and authigenetic components both exist in the carbonates of the sediments,to which attention should be paid when geochemistry analysis is done on carbonates in the sediments.Dissolved elements S and Cl might reflect the ratio of input water to evaporationrelated to salinity.However,these two elements should be treated with caution due to the fact that they are affected by water content in the sediments.