Project summary

The legacy of the great Eurasian Ice Sheets is preserved in buried glacial deposits stretching from Denmark to western Russia. Several sites of putative Early to Middle Pleistocene age are well described in terms of sedimentology, but establishing robust ages has proved a long-standing challenge. This project proposes to apply a newly developed sediment burial-dating method (Knudsen et al. 2020): The Particle Pathway Inversion of Nuclide Inventories (P-PINI) to resolve the depositional ages of key glacial deposits in Central and Western Europe. Samples will be collected in 6 previously documented sites in Czechia, Poland, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, which represent the Eurasian Ice Sheet at close to its greatest extent. The sediment samples will be processed in the Aarhus University Cosmogenic Nuclides Lab under the supervision of Dr Mads Knudsen. The findings of this project will fill an important knowledge gap in our understanding of global climate history. This research is a joint project of Institute of Geophysics, CAS and the Faculty of Science, Charles University.

Selected publications of the research group

Knudsen MF, Nørgaard J, Grischott, R, Kober F, Egholm DL, Mejer T, Jansen JD (2020) New cosmogenic nuclide burial-dating model indicates onset of major glaciation in the Alps during the Middle Pleistocene Transition. Earth & Planetary Science Letters 549, 116491

Jansen JD, Knudsen MF, Andersen JL, Heyman J, Egholm DL (2019) Erosion rates in Fennoscandia during the past million years. Quaternary Science Reviews 207, 37-48

Knudsen MF, Egholm DL, Jansen JD (2019) Time-integrating cosmogenic nuclide inventories under the influence of variable erosion, exposure, and sediment mixing. Quaternary Geochronology 51, 110-119

Margold M, Jansen JD, Codilean AT, Preusser F, Gurinov AL, Fujioka T, Fink D (2018) Repeated megafloods from glacial Lake Vitim, Siberia, to the Arctic Ocean over the past 60,000 years. Quaternary Science Reviews 187, 41-61

Struck M, Jansen JD, Fujioka T, Codilean AT, Fink D, Fülöp R-H, Wilcken KM, Price DM, Kotevski S, Fifield K, Chappell J (2018) Tracking the Be10-Al26 source-area signal in sediment-routing systems of arid central Australia. Earth Surface Dynamics 6, 329-349

Current research projects of the group

Margold: New chronology of deglaciation of the North American Glacier Complex (GAČR, GJ19-21216Y).

Jansen-Knudsen: Searching for the missing ice sheet in Eastern Siberia (FNU, Danish Research Council).

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