Research Details

Luminescence geochronology

Our team focusing on luminescence geochronology, Quatenary earth-surface processes and geoarchology is led by Michael Meyer and includes PhD students Sarah Schaffer & Benjamin Spitaler as well as Master´s students Daniel Sperlich, Marei Drexler, Salome Lanz, Mattis Adam & Florian Schäffer. Our lab manager and technician, Wolfgang Mutschlechner,  is the on-site mastermind behind the laboratory. OSL laboratory (link) & more on youtube (link english) (link german).

Interested Master students can get in contact for potential master topics here.

In solving geological and archaeological questions we apply Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating to a wide range of depositional environments including lake, river, aeolian, glacial and peri-glacial environments as well as cave-mouth sediments and other more exotic deposits.

OSL dating allows the ages of sedimentary deposits to be accurately constrained and has revolutionized studies of events from the past ~300,000 years of Earth’s and humanity’s history. OSL dating is based on the principle that mineral grains, such as quartz and feldspar, absorb energy from the naturally occurring ionizing radiation in their sedimentary environment. This energy is stored as trapped electrons in defects within the crystal lattice, and the number of  trapped electrons increases over time. Optical read out of these electrons under controlled laboratory conditions provides a means to constrain the depositional age of the sediment.

More recently OSL has also been used as a chronometer for dating geological and archaeological rock surfaces. This approach exploits the fact that the latent OSL signal in the topmost centimeters of rock surfaces is gradually reduced while exposed to sun light. We pioneer OSL rock surface dating and apply it in a variety of geological and archaeological contexts.

Scroll down for our current OSL projects funded by the FWF and other funding agencies.

Previous OSL projects and collaborations include (selection):

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Current Projects

This project will establish OSL rock surface dating on firm grounds as a novel way of constraining the age of archaeological and geological rock surfaces. We will make use of state-of-the-art 2D luminescence imaging technology, novel feldspar luminescence signals and protocols in combination with classical OSL dating techniques.

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This project focuses on OSL and IRSL single-grain dating of desert kite complexes at Mount Aragats, Armenia

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This project focuses on sedimentological and geochronological investigation of a unique approximately 80 m thick drill core from the Kufstein area (Tyrol, Austrian Alps), with a reconstruction of regional landscape and ice dynamics.

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We explore the potential of ice-dammed lakes as archives of pre-LGM glacier dynamics in the Eastern Alps by fine-tuning an optical dating approach that integrates multiple IRSL and OSL signals with detailed sedimentological and geomorphological analyses and ice-flow modelling.

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