Eawag: Surface Waters Research + Management: Radioactive Tracers

Research cooperation at Lake Kivu
The main findings of the most recent research partnership project “Lake Kivu: Learning from the past for managing its future”, were presented in two workshops in Kigali and Bukavu. Researchers from the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (Rwanda), the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique of Bukavu (DR Congo) and Eawag had jointly investigated this fascinating lake during the past three years. [...]

Surface Waters Research + Management

Radioactive Tracers

In recent years, radioactive tracers became extremely powerful tools to study various aspects of environmental processes and to date natural archives (ice cores, sediments, tree rings etc.). Using gamma spectrometry and Accelerator mass spectrometry (in collaboration with the group of ion beam physics of ETH) our group explores new applications of cosmic ray produced radionuclides such as ⁷Be, ¹⁰Be, ¹⁴C, ²⁶Al, ³⁶Cl, and ¹²⁹I.

Our main goals are:

to reconstruct the solar activity over at least 10’000 years
to estimate the solar forcing and to study its effect on past and future climate change
to reconstruct the strength of the geomagnetic field
to detect past changes in the global carbon cycle
to study atmospheric transport and deposition processes
to date ice and sediment cores

Projects

Solar Forcing and Climate Change of the last 1000 years [...]
Lacustrine Sediments: High Resolution Archives for Geomagnetic Field Behavior and Paleoclimate [...]
Beryllium-10 as a tracer of solar and geomagnetic variability and erosion rate [...]
Be-10 and Cl-36 in polar ice cores [...]

Team

Jürg Beer, group leader
Silvia Bollhalder Lueck, technician
Alfred Lueck, technician
Johannes Lachner, Postdoc

Contact

Department Head
Carsten Schubert

Administration
Eawag
Surface Waters
Seestrasse 79
6047 Kastanienbaum
Switzerland

Phone +41 (0)58 765 21 11
Fax +41 (0)58 765 21 68