Dating of rock slope failures and rock scarps using novel optical dating techniques

Stephan Fuhrmann
Supervising board members: Michael Meyer

Project Overview

Recently, a new Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating approach, making use of the remnant luminescence signal in rock surfaces, has been successfully applied to geological features and archaeological artefacts, which have previously been considered as being not amenable to numerical dating. This project is based on such an OSL rock surface dating approach and will combine this novel dating approach with a fundamentally new way of reading out the optical information (and thus age) from rock surfaces containing feldspar minerals (i.e. 2D mapping using a EMCCD camera set-up). This state-of-the-art optical dating approach is combined with classical geological fieldwork to determine the age of rock slope failures and rock scarps and to observe bed load transport in bedrock river channels and braided (i.e. glacier influenced) rivers.