Glass is an immensely interesting archaeological material: While its fragility and beauty is fascinating in itself, geochemical studies of invisible tracers can reveal more than what meets the eye. In a new international collaboration study from the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet), the Aarhus Geochemistry and Isotope Research Platform (AGiR) at Aarhus University and the Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project (Aarhus University and University of Münster), researchers have found a way to determine the origin of colourless glass from the Roman period. The study is published in Nature Scientific Reports.

Sediments underlying the world’s oceans and shelf seas cover >70% of the Earth’s surface area. These sediments are the biggest reservoir of organic carbon in the biosphere, hosting over one thousand times more organic carbon than the atmosphere, soils, and seawater combined. Most of this organic carbon was originally produced by organisms, such as phyto- and zooplankton, plants, and animals, that inhabit overlying water and nearby land and whose remains after death were deposited to sediments by sinking through the water column.