Three years ago today, I was excavating ancient hippo fossils!
(4/4) And it helps us understand stratigraphic sequences, such as if if deposits gradually accumulate or there are big gaps etc. This OSL work is being done by Dr Eric Andrieux of the University of Durham, who is a co-investigator of my TerraForm project. Results looking promising.
(2/4) In brief, OSL is a way of measuring the length of time since sediments were exposed to sunlight, so it tells us how old things are by when they were buried. P-OSL is a kind of semi-relative version of this, so we get age profiles for areas we excavate.
Nature is very caperble of beauty
(3/4) It is incredible to be able to see, with a few hours of work, relative age sequences. We can then choose the best spots for full OSL sampling, which is measured back in a lab and gives us good ages on when different deposits, and the interesting cultural things in them, were formed.
(1/4) Fun fieldwork this week. Here we are looking at portable optically stimulated luminescence (P-OSL) data, to guide further sampling and analyses...