Following the Mid-Pleistocene Climate Revolution (around 900.000 years ago), intensification of glacial-interglacial climate variability had major impacts on sediment fluxes and grain sizes transported by Northwest European fluvial systems. In general, increased sediment fluxes and severe grain size coarsening are reported. However, insights on the effects of these climatic changes at catchment scale are still limited.
This project will assess sediment grain size, provenance, erosional/deposition changes, and sediment volumetric changes in the Meuse River catchment since the Middle Pleistocene. Apart from climate change, the study area is affected by tectonic uplift of the catchment (source) and subsidence in the adjoining rift system (sink). This research will improve general insights in fluvial system behavior and associated source to sink responses as a response to climate change and tectonics.
In this project we will first map and characterize sediment grain size distributions, provenance change and terrace
incision versus aggradation from the upstream regions in France and Belgium to the downstream regions in the Netherlands. Second, the mapped data will be set in a temporal framework using available age control, and new cosmogenic, luminescence and paleomagnetic datings, allowing for assessing temporal and spatial variations in these parameters during the last Middle Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles. Third, volumetric sediment changes in the Meuse catchment will be analyzed for each cycle, allowing to establish upstream-to downstream sediment budget variation through time. This allows a quantitative assessment of the source-to-sink routing system in relation to change in climate cyclicity and tectonic motions.
This PhD position is within the framework of a European ITN project named S2S-FUTURE: SIGNAL PROPAGATION IN SOURCE TO SINK for the FUTUre of earth Resources and Energies involving 15 PhD positions.
Supervised by Ronald van Balen (Professor, Vrije Universiteit Amterdam, VUA, Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology), Freek Busschers (TNO Geological Survey of the Netherlands), Renaud Bouroullec (TNO Geological Survey of the Netherlands) and Kees Kasse (VUA,) the PhD student will collect morphological, sedimentological, provenance and grain size data of fluvial sediments deposited around the Mid Pleistocene climate transition for the Meuse river terrace deposits and correlatable sediments in the downstream basin. The project involves field work and mapping in the Netherlands, Germany, France and Belgium, data mining (CPT’s, corings, geo-electrics), dating (cosmogenic, paleomagnetic, luminescence), modelling, and research stays (secondment) at University of Bern, Switzerland (cosmogenic dating Prof. F. Schlunegger; 5 months), and TNO Geological survey of the Netherlands (discussions and data mining, Dr. F.S. Busschers and Dr R. Bouroullec).