Department Surface Waters - Research and Management

The Sedimentology Group at Eawag investigates lake sediments to reconstruct environmental changes of the past and also to evaluate current and potential future changes. Our main approach is to recover sediment cores, which are then analyzed in our laboratories. We do also employ sediment traps and bottom grabbers for specific projects.

Our analytical techniques combine conventional sedimentological proxies such as magnetic susceptibility, elemental composition from XRF core scanner, grain-size distribution, bulk geochemical composition (biogenic silica, organic carbon, calcium carbonate), 210Pb and 1237Cs dating, with more novel organic geochemical tools such as biomarkers and their stable and radio-isotopic composition.

In addition, the Sedimentology Group is involved in the Limnogeology course offered at ETH Zurich, and supervises Bachelor, Masters and PhD theses. 

Our main research foci are:

• Sediments as archives of human-environment interactions (soil erosion, industrial pollution)
• Lake records of Climate change
• Particle dynamics in lakes (erosion-transport-sedimentation)