Establishing chronologies for events recorded in sedimentary deposits or hard rocks is of critical importance to our understanding of the history of our culture, our species, our biosphere and our planet. This is especially true of the last 2.6 million years (the Quaternary) – the period of most relevance to our present climate and to the evolution of our species.
Two of the most important dating methods for interpreting the Quaternary sedimentary record, cosmogenic dating and luminescence dating, are represented in Department of Geoscience: