Quaternary Environments and Geoarchaeology (QEG)
News
QEG contributes to INQUA 2011
The Quaternary Environments and Geoarchaeology Research Group (QEG) attended the INQUA conference in Bern in late July (http://www.inqua.org/). Five staff members, two postgraduates, and a recent PhD graduate presented papers at this meeting, which is the primary Quaternary Science conference held once every four years. The Quaternary- the geological time period of the last 2 million years- has grown massively as a research field in the last 10 years, particularly due to the contribution it makes to the understanding long-term climate change, and this was reflected in the scale of the conference, with over 1500 delegates. Manchester had a considerable presence there, with presentations by colleagues in the School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences as well as SED. In addition to our presentations, Will Fletcher attended the INTIMATE working group planning meeting, Jamie Woodward promoted the journal Geoarchaeology, edited out of Manchester, and Jeff Blackford organised and chaired a 'splinter group' meeting on 'how interglacials end', leading to a potential INQUA working group on this subject. Our contributions to the meeting were made possible by support from the School's Research Support and Conference Fund. Costs of the splinter group meeting including postgraduate costs were kindly supported by the JDS Workshop and Conference Panel Support Fund.
Posted 30 August 2011
Jamie Woodward to give keynote lecture
Jamie Woodward is to give a keynote lecture at the Annual Discussion
Meeting of the UK Quaternary Research Association Meeting in January
2011.
The conference theme is "Palaeohydrology: Learning Lessons from
the Past" and Jamie will be talking about recent advances in the
Mediterranean region.
Posted 6 October 2010
Phil Hughes awarded NERC support
Phil Hughes has been awarded NERC support totalling £36,900 to apply cosmogenic isotope analyses to date glacial landforms in the High Atlas (Morocco) and the Arans (Wales). The Wales project is in collaboration with Professor Neil Glasser (Aberyswyth).
Posted 11 December 2009
The Physical Geography of the Mediterranean, edited by Jamie Woodward, published by OUP
This is the first modern synthesis of the physical geography of the entire Mediterranean world. It is the definitive reference work on the region bringing together the talents of 35 leading scholars. This volume explores the climates, landscapes, ecosystems and hazards that comprise the Mediterranean world. It traces the development of the Mediterranean landscape over very long timescales and examines modern processes and key environmental issues in a wide range of settings.
Posted 29 June 2009
QEG at the Sixth World Archaeological Congress in Dublin
Jamie Woodward and Mike Morley presented invited papers at the 6th World Archaeological Congress in Dublin on June 30th. There were several sessions on Geoarchaeology and they presented the following papers in the session on The Cultural Use of Caves and Rockshelters
Thesiger-Oman International Fellowship awarded to Phil Hughes
With the kind generosity of the His Majesty Qaboos bin Said Al Said, Sultan of Oman, Dr. Phil Hughes has been awarded the Thesiger-Oman International Fellowship (through the Royal Geographical Society). The project is entitled: "Pleistocene Climates of the Northwest Sahara Desert: Evidence from the Glacial Record in the Atlas Mountains, Morocco".
Takis Karkanas visits QEG
Panagiotis (Takis) Karkanas from the Ephoreia of Palaeoanthropology-Speleology in Athens visited QEG at the end of February. Takis is a geoarchaeologist with expertise in micromorphology and the sedimentology of archaeological sites. He has published widely and he has extensive field experience throughout Greece and in many parts of the Mediterranean where he has worked on some of the most important Palaeolithic sites. He also works in South Africa and China. Takis is an Associate Editor for Geoarchaeology and he was the external examiner for Mike Morley's PhD viva on Friday 29th February.
NERC PhD success
Congratulations to Mike Morley who passed with flying colours. Mike’s PhD was funded by NERC and the title of his thesis is: “Mediterranean Geoarchaeology and Quaternary Landscape Dynamics.” Mike is now working for the Museum of London Archaeology Service (MoLAS), where he now holds the position of Senior Geoarchaeologist.
RGS-IBG Grant Success
Congratulations to Rose Wilkinson who has won a Postgraduate Research Award worth £2000 from the RGS-IBG. This is to support her PhD research: “Quaternary environmental dynamics in Montenegro through multiple glacial-interglacial cycles” supervised by Jeff Blackford, Phil Hughes and Jamie Woodward.
ARC Discovery Project Award
Jamie Woodward is part of an international team that has won a Discovery Project Award from the Australian Research Council for $250,000 (2008 to 2010) to fund a project entitled: “Environmental Impacts of Climate Change in the Nile Basin over the Past 30,000 years.” Jamie is a Co-PI with partners in Adelaide (Professor Martin Williams, Coordinator), Bergen (Professor Michael Talbot) and Aberystwyth (Professors Mark Macklin and Geoff Duller).
Jamie Woodward and Mark Macklin carried out fieldwork in the Nile Valley of Northern Sudan in January 2008 in the first stage of the ARC project. They renewed their long-term collaboration with archaeologists from the British Museum led by Dr Derek Welsby who have begun fresh excavations at Kawa on the right bank of the Nile.
NERC support for research in Morocco
Dr. Philip Hughes has been awarded support from the Natural Environment Research Council to undertake cosmogenic beryllium-10 nuclide analyses to provide exposure ages for glacial landforms in the Atlas Mountains, Morocco. This project is a collaboration with Dr. Christoph Schnabel of the NERC Cosmogenic Isotope Analysis Facility at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC).
Jamie Woodward to present invited papers in 2008 at the 39th Annual Binghamton Geomorphology Symposium and at the Fryxell Symposium at the SAA in Vancouver
Jamie Woodward has been invited to present a paper at the 39th Annual Binghamton Geomorphology Symposium to be held at the University of Texas at Austin in October 2008. The theme of the meeting is "Fluvial Deposits and Environmental History." The Binghamton Geomorphology Symposium was initiated by the late Marie Morisawa and has been held each year since 1966. It is the oldest annual geomorphology meeting in North America. Papers will be pre-published in late summer 2008 in a special issue of Geomorphology. The programme can be viewed
at:
Jamie will also be presenting an invited paper at the 73rd Annual Meeting of the SAA (Society for American Archaeology) in Vancouver in March 2008 as part of the annual Fryxell Symposium. This symposium is held to commemorate the career of pioneering geologist and archaeologist Roald Fryxell (1934 to 1974) who made important contributions to the early development of geoarchaeology. Paul Goldberg (Boston University) – who visited the Quaternary Environments and Geoarchaeology Research Group in Manchester in January 2007 and September 2004 – is the recipient of the 2008 Fryxell Award. The title of this year’s symposium is:
Soils and Sediments in Old World and New World Archaeological Settings: A Symposium in Honour of Paul Goldberg
Gary Huckleberry visits QEG
Gary Huckleberry (University of Arizona) visited Manchester in September. Gary is a geomorphologist and geoarchaeologist who has worked extensively in the southwest of the United States exploring the interaction between landscape dynamics and human activity. He gave a paper in the Geography seminar series entitled:
Prehistoric Changes in Climate, Floodplains and Human Settlement in the American Southwest.
Gary Huckleberry in a gully in the Upper North Grain catchment.
Students on the MSc programme in Environmental Monitoring, Modelling and Reconstruction in the Upper North Grain catchment with Martin Evans and John Moore. Gary Huckleberry is in the background.
Gary is the Co-Editor of Geoarchaeology: An International Journal and had meetings with Jamie Woodward, Jeff Blackford and Barry Taylor who are all members of the editorial team here in Geography at Manchester (link here to Geoarchaeology Comes to Manchester Story).
During his visit Gary joined Martin Evans and the new MSc students in the field looking at gully systems in upland peat in the Peak District. There was a lively discussion about the origin of these features and the extent to which they were analogous to the arroyo systems of Arizona!
Geoarchaeology comes to Manchester
Jamie Woodward took over as Editor of Geoarchaeology: An International Journal on May 1st 2007 after serving on the Editorial Board since 2000. He will be sharing the lead editor duties with Gary Huckleberry at the University of Arizona. This is the first time that one of the Editors has been based outside the United States. Geoarchaeology, in its 21st year, is now part of the new Wiley-Blackwells stable and continues to grow in reputation as the flagship journal for international research at the practical and theoretical interface between the geosciences and archaeology. Jeff Blackford joined the journal this month as an Associate Editor.
Barry Taylor - a PhD student in Geography and Archaeology at Manchester and a member of the Quaternary Environments and Geoarchaeology research group - will be working with Jamie and Gary as an editorial assistant. Nick Scarle is working on a new cover design for the journal that will be launched later this year. Watch this space!
FROM SOURCE TO SINK: THE PLIOCENE-QUATERNARY NILE
A one day international conference co-hosted by the Quaternary Environments and Geoarchaeology Research Group and the Basin Studies and Petroleum Geoscience Group at The University of Manchester on Thursday 21st June 2007.
QUATERNARY ENVIRONMENTS AND THE HUMAN PAST
A one day international conference hosted by the Quaternary Environments and Geoarchaeology Research Group at The University of Manchester.
Wednesday 20th June 2007.
Paul Goldberg visits QEG
Paul Goldberg from the Department of Archaeology at Boston University visited Jamie Woodward and colleagues in the Quaternary Environments and Geoarchaeology research group in early January. Later this year Jamie is taking over from Paul to be one of two Co-Editors of Geoarchaeology: An International Journal and this was one of the main reasons for the visit.
Paul also spent some time in the labs with Mike Morley (NERC PhD) looking at thin sections from Middle Palaeolithic hearths from Crvena Stijena rockshelter in Montenegro. Paul has a US National Science Foundation Grant looking at Middle Palaeolithic hearths in France and Israel and the Crvena Stijena data provide a valuable comparative dataset. Paul is a leading expert on micromorphology and you can find out more about his interests and research activities via the following links:
Paul also visited Manchester in September 2004.
Phil Hughes gave a keynote lecture on Mediterranean glaciation at a recent meeting (September 13-22) in Xining, China. Three days of working sessions were held at the Qinghai Institute of Salt Lakes in Xining, followed by a five-day traverse of the Tibetan Plateau to Lhasa with visits to numerous field sites en route.
Read more about the China Meeting (pdf, 120KB)
QEG was well represented at the recent International Geoarchaeology 2006 Conference at the University of Exeter in mid-September. Mike Morley and Jamie Woodward gave two joint papers on their work on rockshelter sediment records and environmental change in the Mediterranean region. Professor Karl Butzer was one of the keynote speakers at this meeting and it was attended by delegates from across Europe and North America.
Jamie Woodward chaired a session on Soils and Landscape Archaeology
Read about QEG at the International Geoarchaeology Conference.
Jamie Woodward and Clive Gamble (Royal Holloway) ran two sessions at the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference on September 1st 2006. Helen Higgs was the guest of honour and the theme of the sessions was:
MOBILITIES, CATCHMENTS, AND QUATERNARY LANDSCAPES: GEOGRAPHY, ARCHAEOLOGY, AND THE WORK OF E. S. HIGGS.
Read more about these sessions.
QEG Paper tops the Global and Planetary Change "Hottest Articles" table for January to March 2006.
Philip Hughes will take part in the INQUA workshop (Timing and Nature of Mountain Glaciation: From High Asia to the World) in China and field excursion across the Tibetan Plateau in September 2006. His participation will be funded by INQUA.
www.itpcas.ac.cn/system/printpage.asp?ArticleID=1446.
Richard Huggett's new book - The Natural History of the Earth: Debating Long-term Change in the Geosphere and Ecosphere - will be published by Routledge later this year. You can find further details at:
www.routledge.com/shopping_cart/products/.
Philip Hughes and Jamie Woodward have secured NERC support (£15,000) from the Isotope Geosciences Facilities Steering Committee (IP/878/1105) for their project "Pleistocene glacier dynamics and palaeoclimate in the Eastern Mediterranean." This will support the development of a uranium-series based geochronology for glacial sequences in Montenegro.
Low sea level rise projections from mountain glaciers and icecaps under global warming
Nature 439, 311-313 (19 January 2006).
Sarah C. B. Raper and Roger J. Braithwaite
The mean sea level has been projected to rise in the 21st century as a result of global warming1. Such projections of sea level change depend on estimated future greenhouse emissions and on differing models, but model-average results from a mid-range scenario (A1B) suggests a 0.387-m rise by 2100. The largest contributions to sea level rise are estimated to come from thermal expansion (0.288 m) and the melting of mountain glaciers and icecaps (0.106 m), with smaller inputs from Greenland (0.024 m) and Antarctica (- 0.074 m). Here we apply a melt model and a geometric volume model4 to our lower estimate of ice volume and assess the contribution of glaciers to sea level rise, excluding those in Greenland and Antarctica. We provide the first separate assessment of melt contributions from mountain glaciers and icecaps, as well as an improved treatment of volume shrinkage. We find that icecaps melt more slowly than mountain glaciers, whose area declines rapidly in the 21st century, making glaciers a limiting source for ice melt. Using two climate models, we project sea level rise due to melting of mountain glaciers and icecaps to be 0.046 and 0.051 m by 2100, about half that of previous projections.