Marit-Solveig Seidenkrantz, Rachel Lupien, and Christof Pearce have received a grant of 905,490 DKK from the Carlsberg Foundation for  acquiring a state-of-the-art Gas Chromatograph (GC) coupled to a Mass Spectrometer (MS) and a Flame Ionization Detector (FID) to identify and analyze organic biomarkers in geological samples for paleoclimate research.

This instrument will give us completely new opportunities for analyses of changes in climate and environment back in time, as we can measure a large number of organic substances (so-called biomarkers) that tell about sea-ice extent, sea-surface temperature, vegetation, forest fires, pollution, as well as the presence of mammals. This is very important knowledge within climate and environmental research, but also in archaeological investigations.

More specifically, the instrument will permit making high-precision measurements of a wide range of biomarker proxies for exploratory research on climate (leaf waxes), vegetation (alkanes), fire (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs), mammalian presence (fecal stanols), sea ice (highly branched isoprenoids, HBIs), ocean productivity and terrigenous input (sterols), grassland abundance (pentacyclic triterpene methyl ethers, PTMEs), sea surface temperature (alkenones), and more.

You can read more about the grants from the Carlsberg Foundation here.