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Past Projects

Holocene climate change in Alaska

This project uses speleothems to establish high-resolution proxy records for southeast Alaska

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Palaeo-Permafrost Ural Mountains

This new project explores the long-term changes of permafrost along the Ural Mountains using both cryogenic cave carbonates and stalagmites as key archives.

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OSL surface dating of rock slope failures

This project further develops and applies a set of classical and novel optical dating techniques to rock fall sites and deep-seated gravitational slope deformations in alpine contexts.

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Ice Caves

Layered ice in Alpine caves offers a largely untapped archive which we explore in a new interdisciplinary project.

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The Last Interglacial in the Alps

The Alps in a warmer world: speleothems offer unique insights in our climate future

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Out in the open

The project will use existing and recently developed OSL methods in novel ways in order to date the use of lithic quarries, the construction of stone arrangements and the accumulation of surface artefact scatters.

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High and dry

This project investigates the climate, landscape and archaeological history of the upper Tibetan Plateau between 50 and 11 ka, the period when Homo sapiens first ventured into oxygen-depleted centre of High Asia.

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Reading the Asian Monsoon Record

This research project aims to shed new light on the interpretation of palaeo-monsoon proxy data using fluid inclusions in speleothem calcite.

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Conturines Cave

Located at 2800 m altitude, this cave contains thick fossil flowstones which hold the key for a better understanding of glacial-interglacial climate change in the Dolomites.

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Eurasian isotope transect

This project studies the Holocene evolution of stable isotopes in precipitation along a transect from the Atlantic seaboard into the largest continental mass on Earth.

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Marine Isotope Stage 11

Widely regarded as the best analogue for the current interglacial, this period some 425,000 years ago is the target of a new research project in our group.

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The Baumkirchen palaeo-lake

We study an exceptionally thick succession of laminated lake sediments which will provide unprecedented insights into inneralpine climate variability prior to the last ice age.

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Palaeoflood record Hallstätter See

This project led by Stefan Lauterbach will establish a 5000 yr-long calendar of flood events in the Eastern Alps based on new cores taken in Hallstätter See in summer 2016.

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Quaternary dynamics Riss Valley

Thick sediments in this major valley of the Karwendel Mountains record a history of repeated lake phases between the Last Glacial Maximum and the mid-Holocene.

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Conturines Cave, Dolomites (pilot phase)

Located at 2800 m altitude, this cave is not only known for its cave bear remains but also contains fossil dripstones which tell a story about past climates in the Dolomites.

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Holocene climate change in the Alps

The Alps are a hot spot of recent climate change and our goal is to establish a detailed framework of speleothems records for the Eastern Alps to better understand regional differences and forcing mechanisms.

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Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles

Speleothems are ideal candidates for investigate millennial-scale climate variability during glacial periods. We have shown that alpine stalagmites faithfully recorded these abrupt shifts.

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Pleistocene of the Unterangerberg terrace

This project aimed at deciphering the history of sedimentation and erosion in one of the largest longitudinal valleys of the Alps, the lower Inn Valley, prior to the Last Glacial Maximum.

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Hypogene water-rock interaction and speleogenesis

The objective of this project was to test a set of methods that allow the identification and quantification of palaeowater-rock interaction during hypogene speleogenesis.

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Loess chronostratigraphy

We apply state-of-the-art OSL techniques to improve the chronological framework of loess-paleosol-sequences (LPS) in the foreland of the Salzach palaeo-glacier, Austria.

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AUSTRO*ICE*CAVES*2100

This project aimed at exploring the palaeoenvironmental potential of ice deposits in some alpine caves and included the successful completion of the first ice core drilling in an alpine ice cave.

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