I am a paleolimnologist and use lake sediments to study environmental processes and set current observations into a long-term context.
I am fascinated by lakes and how lake sediments record past changes of the environment. Isn’t it great? You dig up some mud and it tells us how our ancestors lived, how climate has changed, and how species rose and declined over time. Imagine we didn’t know about the past. How could we judge what’s happening today, and forsee what might happen in the future? We couldn’t study long-term effects and wouldn’t know why the landscape looks the way it does today.
Over the past 10 years, I have cored lakes in Indonesia, Switzerland, and Sweden. I have studied seasonal variability as well as 1 million-year-old sediments, always with the goal to understand and reconstruct past environments. During my PhD, I have worked with sediments from Lake Towuti in Indonesia (Morlock et al. 2021). I have looked at its sediments in 3D, analysed soils, bedrock, and river samples to understand sediment generation (Morlock et al. 2019), and I have eaten a lot of rice during our 2.5-month coring in Indonesia 😊
Currently, I use DNA recovered from sediments to see how plants, mammals, and insects have changed across the Holocene. Since analysing DNA in sediments is still a new field, I also try to understand how erosion and other catchment processes influence the DNA signal (Morlock et al. 2023). This is important to get a precise reconstruction of past environments.
As part of my current research grant, I am now working with Laura Epp at the University of Konstanz in Germany for the coming two years.
If you want to find out more, please don’t hesitate to drop me an email or take a look here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marina_Morlock or here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=fCdxZbEAAAAJ&hl=sv