Archaeology, Environmental Changes & Geo-Chemistry

The labs are busying this afternoon with our third year Bachelor students starting their four week projects! Students are testing carbon isotopes in beers, developing DGTs to measure uranium, measuring strontium isotopes in snail shells to see how they differ from plants, and more! 🐌🌳🍺⚛️🥼

New evidence for Pleistocene hominin presence in the north-east Arabian Desert, Iraq | Antiquity | Cambridge Core New evidence for Pleistocene hominin presence in the north-east Arabian Desert, Iraq

Delighted to announce the publication of 'New evidence for Pleistocene hominin presence in the north-east Arabian Desert, Iraq' by Dr's Ella Egberts, Jaafar Jotheri, and Andreas Nymark

Funded by the BISI Pilot Project Grant

@amgc-vub.bsky.social

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Celebrating the start of the academic year with our @amgc-flux-team.bsky.social friends 🥼😎🎓🔥☀️

@amgc-vub.bsky.social

Lastly, the FLUX PhD and Post-docs wrapped up their week at the #EPSC with a few group photos! 📸 ☄️😀
@amgc-vub.bsky.social
@fienjo.bsky.social
@trygveprestgard.bsky.social

And also congratulations to our #post-doctorate members (Lisa, Samuele, and @trygveprestgard.bsky.social) for presenting their ongoing work on fossil micrometeorites! ☄️
@amgc-vub.bsky.social

A big congratulations to our PhD students who presented their posters at #EPSC last week! They (Clara, Deepak, @fienjo.bsky.social and Julius) shared their latest work on characterizing new micrometeorite collections from Greenland, the Atacama, and Antarctica! ☄️
@amgc-vub.bsky.social

The team is back from a very nice time in #Helsinki at this year's #EPSC! Below is a picture of us all, plus Vinciane Debaille of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, as well as Cem Berk Senel and Ozgur Karatekin of @orb-ksb.bsky.social!
@amgc-vub.bsky.social

During these past weeks, the team has been busy analyzing many newly-found modern and fossil #micrometeorites! Featured in today's post is Clara and Samuele picking out new samples, as well as Maxwell and Trygve measuring their samples with the #Raman spectrometer! ☄️
@amgc-vub.bsky.social

We are on our way to @isba11.bsky.social 🚅 Ready for a week of archaeology and science
🏺🦴🦷🧪⚛️🥼🍝🍕

Our bioavailable strontium baseline for Corsica is out! ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr ranges from 0.7075 to 0.7169 and was established from 245 plant & soil leachate samples from 125 sites.

Check out the article here lnkd.in/e6pDJFCY
and the dataset can be downloaded from the IsoArcH database here lnkd.in/eFNS5Xbw

It's time for more Raman spectra of micrometeorites! Looking forward to analyzing the large amount of data that we will be collecting over the next several days ☄️ #Spectroscopy
@amgc-vub.bsky.social

Just after #Goldschmidt2025, our project's Principal Investigator, Steven Goderis, represented the FLUX team at #MetSoc2025 in Perth! ☄️ @amgc-vub.bsky.social

Had an incredible time at #Goldschmidt2025! We are delighted, and grateful, to have been able to present our ongoing research on micrometeorites. Here’s a group photo with all the participants! 😊☄️ @amgc-vub.bsky.social

In addition to the poster presentations, Fien, Lisa, Samuele and @trygveprestgard.bsky.social presented their talks on modern and fossil micrometeorites, as well as tektites! We are all grateful to have had the opportunity to present at #goldschmidt2025! ☄️ @amgc-vub.bsky.social

The team was happy to be presenting at #goldschmidt2025 in #Prague! On Tuesday last week, Clara, Deepak, Jannes and Julius presented posters on their analysis of various new micrometeorite collections, plus some interesting new cosmochemical data! ☄️ @amgc-vub.bsky.social

Kan afvalwater helpen tegen droogte? Droge zomers vragen om slimme oplossingen – hoe twee jonge onderzoekers meewerken aan duurzaam waterbeheer in Vlaanderen

🌱 Fighting drought with treated wastewater? VUB researchers are onto something!
Using subirrigation tech, they’re recycling purified wastewater to recharge groundwater & help crops. 2022 trials showed groundwater levels rose by 30cm locally! 🌾More details here 👇

www.vub.be/nl/nieuws/ka...

We are grateful to Lisa for having represented the FLUX team at this year’s #AsteroidDay in Luxembourg! 🌍☄️ @amgc-vub.bsky.social

Congratulations #TEFRA team for this accomplishment and thank you, Sevi Triantaphyllou for inviting us to form part of this!

Ευχαριστώ ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

This weekend our team traveled to Thessaloniki to celebrate the end of the #TEFRA project with two days of exciting conferences! 🔥🔥

Reconstructing Life Histories: New Insights Into Cremation Practices, Mobility, and Food Consumption Patterns Through Isotope and Infrared Analyses of Petrous Parts and Teeth This graph shows the strontium results of the individuals from Herstal, Belgium.

📢 New paper alert! 📢

I’m really happy to share our latest publication in AJBA! We explore how sampling cremated petrous parts & teeth helps reconstruct life histories and cremation practices 🔥. You can find our paper through this link: doi.org/10.1002/ajpa... (1/6)

We are happy to end this week with a "family photo" of most FLUX (and related) team members! Despite the Sun being absent, our smiles remained present! A big thanks to Jean-Guillaume Feignon for the photo 😄☄️

These past two weeks have included quite a bit of work with the SEM! Today various members, including Julius and Lisa (below), have been imaging polished sections of their cosmic spherule finds! ☄️😀

Paper Alert 🔥
Want to learn more about Roman cremations?
Can’t sleep because you keep thinking about how the Romans burned their dead?
Then don't miss our latest paper & download it for free here: kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F...

It's nearing the end of another productive week! Today's post features @fienjo.bsky.social and Samuele hunting for cosmic spherules, as well as @trygveprestgard.bsky.social measuring micrometeorites using the Raman spectrometer! Included is also an image showing *some* finds made by Sam this week!

Received a tour at the excavations of the (first) castle of the counts of Flanders in Ypres today! A very exciting find regarding the earliest history of the city, and for my research on the city's earliest city-dwellers... 🏰 @amgc-vub.bsky.social @shoc-vub.bsky.social

We are happy to end the day with this relatively large (>400 µm) S-type cosmic spherule find, most likely of the "Barred olivine (Bo)" subtype! This sample was found in Antarctic sediments. ☄️😀

On Tuesday we collected abundant new Raman spectra of over a dozen cosmic spherules! We look forward to analyzing the data in detail ☄️😀

Next time you feel the sharp sting of a nettle (Urtica), think of its fascinating stinging microhairs - here around 150–200 µm in length - with irritating chemicals stored in their bulbous heads. The study study investigates plant silica bodies (phytoliths), including these microhairs and other morphotypes, of extant dicotyledons prevalent in North-Western Europe, establishing a baseline for botanical, archaeobotanical, and palaeoecological research.

🎉 Good news! The paper ‘Phytoliths in dicotyledons occurring in Northwest Europe: establishing a baseline’ by R. Hermans et al. is now #free for a limited time 1/7

👉 doi.org/pdrp

@rosaliehermans.bsky.social
@christophe-fire.bsky.social
@caestromberg.bsky.social
@tloeffelmann.bsky.social