Leicester Quaternary Palaeoenvironments Research Group
Introduction | Members | Our Research | Current Projects | Facilities | Environmental Stable Isotope Laboratory | Analytical Services | Publications
Why study the Quaternary?
Given concerns over human-induced changes to the world’s climate over the next century there is an increasing impetus to understand the causes of major climatic fluctuations throughout geological history. The last two million years (The Quaternary) have been characterised by great fluctuations in the earth’s climate, producing the extreme cold of ice ages, as well as periods of warmth known as “interglacials"; some of which may have been warmer than the present (Holocene) interglacial. Geological evidence reveals rapid shifts in the global climate throughout the Quaternary, which are thought to reflect complex interactions and feedbacks between the atmosphere, oceans and terrestrial land surfaces.
Why the low latitudes?
The world’s climate is driven by the atmospheric and oceanic redistribution of heat from low to high latitudes. Thus, understanding the past climatic dynamism of the low-latitudes, principally the inter-tropical convergence zone, the trade wind systems and the sub-tropical high pressure cells is critical if we are to understand the fundamental causes of global climatic changes. Quaternary environmental research at Leicester is focussed on these relatively understudied and challenging environments. Data obtained from these regions reveal significant landscape and ecological dynamism over timescales ranging from decades to hundreds of thousands of years.
News
New Infrastructure
This year we were awarded funding to set up a new state-of-the-art luminescence dating facility. This will be housed in the Department of Geography and should be up and running by spring/summer 2012. The facility will comprise a Risø luminescence reader with single grain laser attachment, along with brand new sample preparation laboratories and field gamma spectrometry equipment.
2011 Conferences
Work from a range of our projects was presented at the EGU and INQUA congresses. View INQUA abstracts.
PhD success
Congratulations to Ahmed Al-Dughairi and Javier Medina Sanchez who both successfully defended their PhD theses this year.
