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The Dust and the Database – Challenges in Deep-Time Routing of Small Sedimentary Particles from a Mineralogical Perspective

Deep-time reconstruction of palaeoenvironments is of great importance for many geoscientific and life science disciplines. Various geoarchives provide information on ancient dust fluxes that affect climate and biodiversity and which also hold clues to palaeogeography. Furthermore, "rates" are integral to almost all related research questions, requiring the use of state-of-the-art dating techniques on various materials that act as dust traps.

Intercontinental dust fluxes, such as those from the African deserts to South America cause large-scale geo-bio interactions. Such wind-blown particles fertilise the vibrant ecosystems of the Amazon rainforrest, where the dust is rapidly metabolised or bioturbated by countless organisms. Saharan dust transported to Europe is also difficult to trace back through time, as single events rarely result in detectable deposits. This calls for alternatives to conventional drilling or outcrop studies. Datable dust archives containing detrital heavy minerals provide snapshots of dust transport in a high spatio-temporal resolution. Therefore, analyses like LA-ICP-MS U-Pb age determination on detrital zircon or SEM-EDX chemical characterisation on large numbers of individual terrestrial dust particles are applied.

However, even the most advanced techniques for exploiting new geoarchives are of limited benefit without information on the original dust sources and their availability over time. For this reason, the evolution of drainage systems through time is studied in particular, as rivers are often the primary source of desert sediments. This whole approach involves compilation and processing of large datasets, e.g. a circum-Atlantic zircon age database (N>5000, n>275000). Initial results are very encouraging and go beyond the proof-of-concept stage.

Details

Author
Andreas Gärtner1, Anja Sagawe1, Mandy Zieger-Hofmann1, Johannes Zieger1, Madelaine Böhme2, Ulf Linnemann1
Institutionen
1Senckenberg Naturhistorische Sammlungen Dresden, Museum für Mineralogie und Geologie, Dresden, Germany; 2Department of Geosciences, Eberhard-Karls-University of Tübingen, Germany;Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, Tübingen, Germany
Veranstaltung
GeoSaxonia 2024
Datum
2024
DOI
10.48380/10z4-1f19