AGATE

The project aims to date objects from palaeoenvironmental archives (sediments, tree rings, water) with the highest possible temporal accuracy and to investigate as well as document abrupt climatic fluctuations in the past. The main goal is to reconstruct the changes in global and regional climate over the last 10,000 to 300,000 years. The informations obtained in the project is relevant for understanding the processes that control climate and for validating existing climate models. The team uses methods of radiometric dating with 14C, U-Th, 10Be as well as the electron spin resonance spectroscopy and mass spectrometric analyses of the isotopic composition of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. For more than a decade, the Research Unit has been working very closely and successfully with geoscientific institutes in Germany.