We are delighted to welcome William Rapuc, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Durham and the EDYTEM laboratory, for a seminar entitled “Unravelling the effects of climate and human activities on soil evolution during the Holocene using lake sediments” on Thursday September 13 at 1:30 pm.
The seminar will be held in room 1129 of building 714.
Summary: In recent years, with the advent of research focused on the Anthropocene, it has become apparent that a key factor in understanding how and when human activities began to impact their environment is to successfully disentangle changes linked to climatic fluctuations from those linked to human activities. Among all the effects of human activities, the drastic increase in soil erosion worldwide is one of the major characteristics of the Anthropocene. However, the impact of human activities on erosion over thousands of years has yet to be properly quantified. This question is particularly crucial in mountain areas, where the highest erosion rates are recorded. Here we show how, by developing a method based on lake sediments from one of the largest lakes in the European Alps, it has been possible to quantitatively estimate the impact of human activities on erosion using a multi-proxy, source-to-sink approach based on isotope geochemistry.