Eurasian loess deposits preserve important records of Pleistocene climate and environmental change. However, their full significance can only be revealed once a reliable absolute chronology is established. The overall objective of the research programme is to contribute to an improved understanding of the time-relationship between the widespread loess sequences and the signatures of regional climate changes archived within these deposits. To this purpose, a systematic chronological study is performed using modern luminescence dating procedures for quartz and feldspar.
This application concerns research that is to performed during the third year of the applicant's postdoctoral fellowship (second renewal). The main aim is to test the applicability of a newly developed feldspar post-IR infra-red stimulated luminescence (IRSL) dating method. This method has been shown to be accurate back to 600ka, at least for sandy sediments. We want to tap its potential for dating loess (silt-sized sediments) to enable interpreting these sedimentary archives over mulitple glacial/interglacial cycles, across an area that extends from NW Europe through to Central ASia.