Sedimentology

The Sedimentology Group at Eawag investigates lacustrine sedimentary archives of various temporal and spatial scales to reconstruct environmental changes of the past but also in order to evaluate current and potential future changes. There is a variety or research projects using the approach developed in the context of marine geology and geophysics, including modern limnologic calibrations, geophysic surveying, sediment coring and diverse analytical techniques.
In addition, limnogeology is part of courses in the ETH curriculum  and the focus of a series of bachelor and master theses, emphasizing also the educational significance of investigating lacustrine basins.
We closely cooperate with the Limnogeology Laboratory, the Climate Geology and Sediment Dynamics Groups of the ETH Zürich.

We have these main foci:

• Particle dynamics (erosion-transport-sedimentation) on a source-to-sink approach
• Climate change recorded in lake sediments
• Natural hazards in and around lakes
• Sediments as archives of human-environment interactions
  

Projects

• Active participation in ICDP Lake Drilling Projects [...]:
  
  • Lake Petén Itzá (Guatemala)
  • Lake Potrok Aike (Southern Patagonia, Argentina)
  • Lake Van (Eastern Anatolia, Turkey) [...]

• Particle dynamics in a proglacial alpine hydropower lake (Grimsel Lakes, Switzerland) [...]
• Human-environment interactions [...]
• Swath bathymetric investigations of Swiss Lakes. Implications for lake floor processes and natural hazards [...]
• Intensity and frequency of strong precipitation events in the Alpine realm (FloodAlp) [...]
• Slope instabilities on lateral and delta slopes in Swiss lakes [...]
• Paleoseismology based on lake sediments [...]
• The climate record of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego [...]
• Glaciation history and environmental evolution of overdeepened valleys in the northern Alpine Foreland [...]
• Release of persistent organic pollutants from melting alpine glaciers [...]
• BANBU: Holocene climate change in the Mediterranean Basin across an East to West gradient [...]

Team

• Flavio Anselmetti, group leader
• Irene Brunner, technician
• Alois Zwyssig, technician
• Michael Sturm, senior scientist
• Ola Kwiecien, Postdoc
  
• Mario Morellón Marteles, Postdoc
• Lukas Glur, PhD student
• Michael Hilbe, PhD student
• Mona Stockhecke, PhD student 
• Stefanie Wirth, PhD student (ETH)

Publications

Publication list

We use SMT Kingdom Suite software to interpret our reflection seismic data:
For more infos: http://www.seismicmicro.com