Podcast INQUA India 2027

Season 6 – Episode 3 – Luminescence as a Time Step

There are many methods to get timestamps for past events, such as looking for fossils of a specific time period, or radiocarbon dating. Today, we’ll learn about another method popularly used by Quaternary scientists, called luminescence dating. By the way, where can we find these timestamps? Almost everywhere – lake deposits, glacial deposits, flood deposits, tsunami deposits, marine deposits – wherever there is quartz sediment, we can find luminescence timestamps. For example, this luminescence timestamp is present in the potteries, bricks and urns in archaeological sites. And thus, this method is helpful in archaeological studies and getting insights about past human societies and civilizations.

The Luminescence Dating Laboratory at BSIP, Lucknow was established in 2015. Since then, Dr. Morthekai’s group has contributed to several important works and discoveries. For example, they dated the oldest glacial expansion which occurred 80 thousand years ago, of the Kalla Glacier in the Central Himalayas. They identified and quantified the presence of rock derived organic carbon in Central Himalayan lake sediments. They also established luminescence dating methods to use on diatoms – a type of unicellular organisms which produce siliceous shells or fossils. They developed techniques to record a new signal, which is called re-distributed infra-red stimulated luminescence or RD-IRSL, and this can be used to date material older than 780 thousand years.

Dr. P Morthekai Veraa Singh & Team Podcast