News
July 2024
July has been an exceptionally busy and exciting month in our group!
Not one but two students graduated with their PhDs in luminescence dating! Dr. Gwyn Buchanan and Dr. Neda Rahimzadeh were supervised by new Tübingen Professor (jointly with LIAG in Hannover) Sumiko Tsukamoto and examined by Profs. Tsukamoto and Fitzsimmons. Both women defended their theses extremely well and have gained important new insights into dating old feldspars and quartz sediment grains respectively.
We hosted Dr. Xinyang Fan (Oeschger Center for Climate Change Research, Universität Bern, Switzerland) – Dr. Fan is collaborator and advisor on MSc student Anaya Tiwari’s project investigating the sensitivity of southeastern Australian aquifers to Anthropocene climate change, and also gave an excellent talk in the departmental seminar series.
We welcome two visitors to the group: Dr. Giovanni Monegato (IGG CNR, Italy) visited for one week to collaborate with our PhD student Qutbudin Ishanch on provenancing alpine-sourced river sediments in northern Italy. Prof. Giancarlo Scardia (UNESP, Brazil) is visiting for one month to continue and develop collaborations in palaeomagnetism and environmental magnetism of sediments around the world.
Last, but certainly not least, we welcome Dr. Amin Ghafarpour, who is starting in our group as a Teach@Tübingen postdoctoral fellow! Dr. Ghafarpour is joining us from Iran, where he has led a number of exciting studies on loess sediment characteristics from the Caspian Sea region. He will be investigating the link between loess and atmospheric dynamics in northern Kazakhstan during his time in our group.
May 2024
This month our postdoc, Kanchan Mishra, published a study in Frontiers in Environmental Science investigating seasonal water turbidity in one of Central Asia’s largest lakes – Lake Balkhash – over the Anthropocene. This work complements our group’s diverse research interests in long and short-term environmental change in Arid Central Asia and represents Dr Mishra’s first publication funded by her ECR grant awarded by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science. Congratulations Kanchan!
February 2024
Our postdoc, Andrea Aquino, this month led a paper which provides a quantitative assessment of weathering and palaeoclimate conditions in the loess of Tajikistan, based on elemental geochemistry and environmental magnetism. The Open Access study is published in Frontiers in Earth Science and is part of a large collaborative project with researchers based in Tübingen, Tajikistan, Brazil, Romania, France and Austria. In a follow-up to this work, visiting MSc student from University of Poitiers Julien Resic has been undertaking a systematic comparison of loess sediment geochemistry using benchtop and portable XRF. Watch this space!
Group members Qutbudin Ishanch (PhD student), Tobias Lauer (Lab Leader) and Kathryn Fitzsimmons returned from a successful trip to sample the dynamic Serio and Astico Rivers on the Po Plain of northern Italy. The aim is to characterize and determine the variable provenance of sediments from flood events, in drought-affected engineered and non-engineered rivers deriving from alpine catchments. This fieldwork was funded by the UK Royal Geographical Society and was undertaken in collaboration with Drs. Vittoria Scorpio and Sharon Pittau (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia) and Dr. Giovanni Monegato (IGG CNR Padova).
January 2024
Happy new year! We start the year with a couple of exciting things:
Our erstwhile postdoc, Dr. Aditi K. Dave (now Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania), has just been awarded the ECR Outstanding Paper Award for 2023 from Journal of Quaternary Science. Aditi’s paper, “The patchwork loess of Central Asia: Implications for interpreting aeolian dynamics and past climate circulation in piedmont regions” was completed while she was in our group in Tübingen. Congratulations Aditi!
Our big synthesis of loess ages and environmental proxy data for Asia was published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science. This was a huge undertaking involving many research groups, and coordinated by our colleague Prof. Guoqiang Li of Lanzhou University (China). The paper is open access and can be accessed on the stable link here: https://rdcu.be/du5xK
October 2023
Our lab-leader Tobias Lauer was elected to be a member of the "Subkommission Quartär der Deutschen Stratigraphischen Kommission"
September 2023
Group members Victoria Schwarz (MSc student) and Kathryn Fitzsimmons have just returned from successful fieldwork in southeastern Australia, investigating records of hydroclimate in drought-prone areas from both the land surface and subsurface. This fieldwork was funded by our DAAD-Universities Australia grant and was undertaken in collaboration with Dr. Monika Markowska (postdoc, MPIC) and Felix Lauer (PhD student, University of Melbourne). Watch this space for the YouTube video in the coming months!
August 2023
Our recently completed BSc student, Lorenz Fischer, just published his work in the international peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Earth Sciences. In this article, he introduces his new toolkit for characterizing desert dunefield morphology over large scales – using entirely open-source software, datasets and code. The paper is completely open access too. Congratulations, Lorenz!
July 2023
We are happy to announce that our postdoc, Dr. Kanchan Mishra, has been awarded funding in the form of the University of Tübingen Program for the promotion of junior researchers (32700 EUR). Kanchan will be using remote sensing and hydrological techniques to investigate degradation thresholds in dryland rivers in Central Asia. Congratulations Kanchan!
March 2023
Our working group is on YouTube! Follow our exploits in the field. Our YouTube Channel is now active and our 2022 film from fieldwork in Kazakhstan – edited by MSc student Kai Szichta and with soundtrack by Andreas Wilhelm – is now online. More to come as our intrepid AG goes on more adventures!
February 2023
We are excited to announce that we have been awarded the Thesiger-Oman International Fellowship from the Royal Geographical Society – Institute of British Geographers. This fellowship is awarded to our collaboration with Prof. Nosir Safaraliev (Tajik National University) and will support an expedition to Tajikistan in the summer to investigate the risk of sediment mobilization in Central Asian drylands in the context of climate change. This research project forms the focus of Qutbudin Ishanch’s PhD.
November 2022
21 November 2022
Today we published our work on the reconstruction of quantitative climate parameters within terrestrial loess deposits in Nature Communications Earth and Environment. This study, which focused on earthworm calcite granules as an exciting new proxy for past climate, was led by our previous postdoc, Dr. Charlotte Prud’homme. The work forms part of a DFG-funded grant in collaboration with researchers from JGU Mainz, Dr. Peter Fischer and Prof. Andreas Vött.
You can read our press release here.
We are happy to announce that we have been funded by the DAAD-Universities Australia for a Project-related Personal Exchange (PPP) to work on the theme of hydroclimatic change on desert margins in Australia. This will be a cooperation with Dr. Monika Markowska (MPIC), Prof. Russell Drysdale (Uni Melbourne) and Prof. Kira Rehfeld (Uni Tübingen). Looking forward to it!
October 2022
We welcome two new colleagues to our group:
Dr. Kanchan Mishra is joining us as a postdoc, working on remote sensing and GIS of linked hydrological and aeolian systems.
Mr. Qutbudin Ishanch is joining us as our first PhD student, on a DAAD-University of Central Asia scholarship. He will be working on the risk and characteristics of sediment mobilization in dryland Central Asia.
Welcome, Kanchan and Ishanch!
August 2022
This month we successfully completed fieldwork in southeastern Kazakhstan. We tackled two separate scientific problems:
Here are some happy snaps from the field: |
July 2022
This month we farewell two members of our group: Dr. Aditi Dave is starting a new postdoc at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, with Prof. Alida Timar-Gabor. Dr. Sonal Khanolkar is starting a new postdoc in the ocean circulation and climate dynamics group at GEOMAR, Kiel. We wish both of you all the best in your new posts! |
March 2022
We welcome two new colleagues to our group:
Dr. Sonal Khanolkar is joining us as a postdoc, working on quantifying the risk and vulnerability of Central Asian rangelands to climate change and land use.
------- Andrea successfully defended his PhD thesis at the University of Pisa (Italy) this month. Congratulations, Dr. Aquino! Also: those interested in sediments and Central Asia may be interested in watching the following talks held this month:
|
November 2021
Andrea Aquino officially joined our group as a postdoc, having submitted his PhD thesis to the University of Pisa (Italy) in October. Welcome Andrea! |
October 2021
Prof. Fitzsimmons’ experience of motherhood in science was reported online here. |
September 2021
Exciting times ahead! The Terrestrial Sedimentology Group got started this month at the University of Tübingen. The Group currently comprises:
In addition, Dr. Dave was awarded the Martin Aitken Prize for Fundamental Research at the 16th International Luminescence and Electron Spin Resonance Dating Conference. Congratulations Aditi! |