Analyses of environmental changes - Focus: Archives

About the course

Our entire world is connected through a network of biogeochemical processes. The atmosphere affects the composition of the rain, which affects the vegetation, that - in turn - affects the soil, stream, lake and eventually the sediment that accumulates at the bottom of the lake. The traces these biogeochemical processes leave in the environment can be used to tease out how our environment has changed, and is changing. The aim of this course is to provide knowledge on how different biogeochemical approaches can be used to study environmental change in a broad context. The focus will be on how natural archives (e.g., lake sediments) can be used to understand slow, and gradual, changes that are active over centuries to millennia. During the course we will discuss background/reference conditions, as well as, natural variability and analytical uncertainty, and how these concepts relate to our understanding of both natural and anthropogenic environmental changes.
 
The course is divided into the following two modules, which run in parallel during the course. Parts of the course are integrated with the course "Analyses of environmental changes - Focus: Long-term environmental problems".