Author: Georgina King

Nadja Stalder submitted her PhD thesis this week, titled “Interactions between tectonics, climate and erosion – a case study of the Central Andes using low-temperature thermochronology”. Congratulations Nadja!

Nadja was supervised by Prof. Frédéric Herman and will defend her thesis privately on June 9th with a committee additionally composed of three external experts, Prof. Peter Reiners (University of Arizona), Dr. M. Giuditta Fellin (ETH Zürich) and Prof. Manfred Strecker (University of Potsdam) as well as one internal expert Prof. Lukas Baugartner.

Christoph Schmidt joined ICE on April 1st.

Christoph is an expert in trapped-charge dating with more than 10 years of experience. His research to date has primarily focussed on understanding and quantifying landscape changes throughout the Quaternary, with particular interests in human-environment interactions and constraining late-Quaternary volcanism.

He is joining ICE as a senior scientist with overall responsibility for the trapped-charge dating laboratories.

You can find out more about Christoph here.  Welcome Christoph!

As part of the recently started ERC project ICED, Georgina and Lily visited to the KTB borehole, Windinscheschenbach (Bavaria) to collect a range of calibration samples. The KTB borehole was drilled between 1987 and 1995 reaching a depth of 9 km and temperatures of over 300 °C. Because this region has been tectonically stable over 10s of millions of years, these samples have experienced stable temperatures and thus provide an excellent calibration set for thermochronometry. These samples will be used to confirm the performance of the electron spin resonance (ESR) thermochronometry method.