ICE: Interactions between Climate and Earth surface processes

It is bitter sweet to say farewell to Lily Bossin and Rabiul Biswas this month, who have both secured permanent academic positions elsewhere.

Rabiul joined IDyST as a Senior SNSF Scientist in 2015. He has been involved in numerous projects since then, especially the development of thermoluminescence thermochronometry, and more recently thermoluminescence thermometry. Rabiul has secured an Assistant Professor position in the Department of Earth Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

Lily joined IDyST as a post-doctoral researcher in February 2019. She was key to the establishment of the Electron Spin Resonance dating laboratory and has been working towards the establishment of measurement protocols for ESR thermochronometry. Lily has secured a position as a Physicist at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland.

This is a fantastic and very much well deserved achievement for both Lily and Rabiul, and whilst we will miss them, we wish them the best of luck in their new positions and for their future careers!

Leif Anderson joined ICE on November 1st.

Leif is a geomorphologist and glaciologist. He develops numerical models to understand glacier, climate, and landscape change. He addresses Quaternary timescale questions to place modern, observed changes in context. Leif’s focus more recently has been on future glacier evolution.

Leif is joining ICE as a postdoctoral researcher to model the erosion of the Alps over the last million years on the ICED project, you can find out more about his research here.

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!

Benjamin latest study on postglacial erosion using luminescence is featured on the cover of Geology. Well done and nice picture!

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.

Evaluating post-glacial bedrock erosion and surface exposure duration by coupling in situ optically stimulated luminescence and 10Be dating:

 

 

Read about the GLACE expedition and the science projects here: https://www.glaceexpedition.ch/

Find details about his project here

 

Benjamin PhD project supervised by Prof. Dr. Frédéric Herman will be privatly defended on March 6th with Prof. Dr. Derek Fabel, Prof. Dr. Andreas Lang and Dr. Pierre Valla as external experts and Prof. Dr. Georgina E. King as internal expert.