Research Statement
To comprehend current and future climate and environmental change, understanding the paleoenvironment is of utmost importance. Such a reconstruction of past conditions is made possible by a multitude of proxies and methods in a number of disciplines. Personally, I am especially curious about Quaternary climatic and geomorphological events, as they played a large role in shaping the planet we live on today. Applying a multiproxy approach to compare various records of past climate and other environmental factors thereby gives me a chance to get a glimpse of the bigger picture of past change, providing a base to make connections to the present and future. Especially to recognize the scale and relevance of current climatic change, I aim to gain a better understanding of past atmosphere-surface interactions by combining geomorphological and climatological methods like luminescence dating and paleothermometry, or the examination of multiple proxy records.
Biography
Initially I studied the master’s program Man-Climate-Paleoenvironment at the Justus-Liebig-University Gießen (Germany), for which I received my Master of Science in 2021. My Master’s project focused on the reconstruction of Arctic Swedish inland dune reactivation using Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating.
Having become fascinated by the Arctic environment, I then continued my education at Stockholm University (Sweden), where I attended a number of courses from the master’s program Polar Landscapes and Quaternary Climate, focusing mainly on glaciers, permafrost and the periglacial environment.
As of July 2022, I am now a member of the ICE group at UNIL, pursuing my PhD. Picking up on my interests and past experience, I will work with luminescence paleothermometry to reconstruct surface air temperatures along multiple altitudinal and longitudinal transects throughout Europe and northern Africa. The project aims to better understand the temperature aspect of the climatic transition between the Pleistocene and the Holocene to provide a more comprehensive record of temperature data to be fed into climate models.
Contact details
University of Lausanne
Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics
Geopolis – Office 3151
CH-1015 Lausanne
salome.oehler@unil.ch
Publications
2024
Oehler, S., Stevens, T., Kolb, T., Possnert, G., Fuchs, M., in press. Combined optically stimulated luminescence and radiocarbon dating of aeolian dunes in Arctic Sweden. Permafrost and Periglacial Processes 35 (2), 172-187, DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/ppp.2216
2023
Werner, N., Oehler, S., Rendlert, F., Gunnarson, B., 2023. Reduced accuracy in dendroglaciological mass balance reconstruction of Storglaciären since the 1980s. The Holocene 1-7, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/09596836231211873