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Thursday 01 August 2024
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A Coventry University scientist is using ‘rocks as clocks’ to prove the age of ancient glaciers and help predict what may come in the battle against climate change.
Dr Geraint Jenkins and colleagues from universities in China collected a number of rocks from the Tibetan Plateau – the largest and highest plateau on Earth – and then carried out scientific tests on the samples to calculate how old they are.
Over time, rocks collect energy which is emitted as light during the experiment – called luminescence – and Dr Jenkins and fellow scientists measured the light within the rocks at around 18,000 years old. This means that an ice glacier once covered the Tibetan Plateau – known was ‘the roof of the world’ – giving the team an insight into when the glacier was there and how long it took to disappear.
This allows them to look at past climate change and Dr Jenkins, a lecturer in physical geography, hopes the technique can now be developed to be used on ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica to show how large they used to be and when, as well as allowing scientists to link ice sheet sizes to past climate records to help understand how climate drives large-scale ice melting.
Dr Jenkins’ work alongside Professor Xianjiao Ou, Luminescence Laboratory Founder at Jiaying University, and Kunmei Yang from the same institution, as well as Dr Jinming Xie at South China Normal University, was only the third time this technology has ever been used in this way.
Handling and analysing a rock that was last exposed to daylight 18,000 years ago is certainly awe-inspiring. Who would have thought that by simply slicing this rock we could see that light once penetrated into the sub-surface 18,000 years ago.
This technique can be used to date moraines – materials and debris left behind by a glacier – that are found all around the margin of Greenland, which is incredibly exciting and we hope to measure those very soon.
We know that glaciers and ice sheets extended much greater than they are now but finding out when is the key question. We hope to date other landscapes in the Tibetan Plateau and also the margins of Greenland, and hope that this new technique becomes routine in calculating the timings of ancient ice sheets and glaciers.
Dr Geraint Jenkins, lecturer in physical geography
Find out more about studying geography at Coventry University.