Short courses > SC1-Geochronology

Organisers

1. Maarten Blaauw (School of Natural & Built Environment, Queen's University Belfast, UK)

2. Pierre Sabatier (EDYTEM, CNRS, Université Savoie Mont-Blanc, France)

Description

The aim of this full-day course is to provide key information about two geochronological methods classically used in lake sediment for dating the last century (Short-lived radionuclides) and over millennial timescales (Radiocarbon). After a short course on the method, practical training will be done using R (CRAN) dedicated packages.

-        Short-lived radionuclides age modeling (²¹⁰Pbex, ¹³⁷Cs) (4h, by Pierre Sabatier)

This course is aimed at researchers using short-lived radionuclides in lake sediment. A first part of the course will cover key aspects of ²¹⁰Pbex methods (sampling, hypothesis) with associated models (CFCS, CRS, CIC…) and ¹³⁷Cs/²⁴¹Am artificial fallout. Then, the course will focus on practice of serac R package for age modeling with in different context (sedimentation change, event deposit, hiatus, bioturbation…) on lake sediment.

-        Radiocarbon age-depth modeling (4h, by Maarten Blaauw)

This course is aimed at researchers using radiocarbon in lake sediment. A first part of the course will cover key aspects of radiocarbon dating (sampling, calibration, reservoir effects and chronological modelling). Plum, a Bayesian approach to ²¹⁰Pb age-depth modelling, will also be discussed. Then, participants will use R packages (clam, rice, coffee, rbacon, rplum) for classical and Bayesian calibration and age modeling with the construction of Bayesian chronologies on lake sediment.

Limited to 30 applicants.

Prerequisite

Need to have a laptop with R (https://cran.r-project.org/; at least version 4.4.1) and different packages already installed:

-        clam (Blaauw 2010; at least version 2.6.1)

-        coffee (Blaauw et al. 2024; at least version 0.4.1)

-        rbacon (Blaauw and Christen, 2011) (at least version 3.3.1)

-        rplum (Aquino et al. 2018, at least version 0.5.1)

-        Serac (Bruel and Sabatier, 2020) (available on github)

The above packages can be installed using the following R commands:

install.packages(c(‘clam’, ‘coffee’, ‘rbacon’, ‘rplum’))

install.packages(‘devtools’)

devtools::install_github("rosalieb/serac", build_vignettes = TRUE)

 References

- Aquino-López, M.A., Blaauw, M., Christen, J.A., Sanderson, N., 2018. Bayesian analysis of ²¹⁰Pb dating. Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics 23, 317-333 doi:10.1007/s13253-018-0328-7

- Blaauw, M., 2010. Methods and code for 'classical' age-modelling of radiocarbon sequences. Quaternary Geochronology 5, 512-518 doi:10.1016/j.quageo.2010.01.002

- Blaauw, M., Aquino-López, M.A., Christen, J.A., in press. Modelling chronologically ordered radiocarbon dates in R. Radiocarbon doi:10.1017/RDC.2024.56

- Blaauw, M., Christen, J.A., 2011. Flexible paleoclimate age-depth models using an autoregressive gamma process. Bayesian Anal. 6. https://doi.org/10.1214/11-BA618

- Bruel, R., Sabatier, P., 2020. serac: an R package for ShortlivEd RAdionuclide chronology of recent sediment cores. Journal of Environmental Radioactivity 225, 106449. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvrad.2020.106449