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Newsletter 2011-2
Chairman : Dr. David Bridgland
University of Durham
United Kingdom
Secretary : Dr. Stéphane Cordier
Université Paris Est Créteil Val de Marne
France
Executive members
Prof. Jef Vandenberghe (Past Chairman)
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Prof. Juergen Herget
University of Bonn
Germany
visit our Website :
http://tolu.giub.uni-bonn.de/herget/FLAG/
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Please send to Stephane Cordier
any information (workshop, field-trips, PhD defense or report etc)
you would like to read in our next Newsletter!
Update of the FLAG-membership list
If you wish not to receive the next FLAG Newsletters please just send a “no” reply to:
CONTENTS
- Report of Jef Vandenberghe's retirement symposium (Amsterdam, 1st April 2011)
- FLAG session at INQUA : the programme
- Special issue of the FLAG session at INQUA: call for papers
- Announcement : FLAG business meeting at INQUA
- Palaeoflood session at INQUA : the programme
- Information about the LUCIFS research group
- Information about the Geologists' Association meeting on Geoconservation (September
2011)
- for your agenda : FLAG 2012 in Luxemburg
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Report of Jef Vandenberghe's retirement symposium
The symposium in honour of our past Chairman Jef Vandenberghe was held in Amsterdam
the 1st of April 2011. Over 60 colleagues and friends attended, mainly from the Netherlands
but also from Europe (including Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Serbia) and
abroad.
This one day symposium included two main sessions and eleven talks. The morning
session, chaired by Kees Kasse, was composed of five invited talks focusing on the main
topics which dominated Jef's research during his fruitful career.
The talk of Hugh French (University of Ottawa, Canada) focused on the
cryostratigraphy in periglacial systems, while those of Huayu Lu (University of Nanjing,
China) and Slobodan Markovic (University of Novi-Sad, Serbia) were devoted to synthesis
about loess, both in China and in Europe (mainly Serbia), with an attempt to unravel the links
between loess sedimentation and climate change. In between, Phil Gibbard (University of
Cambridge) provided an overview of the fluvial response of temperate rivers to Pleistocene
climate cycles. This presentation, mainly based on case studies from England, underlined the
high influence of cold periods on fluvial activity and the importance of thresholds in the
explanation of climate forcing. Finally, Gert Verstraeten (Leuven University, Belgium)
established a link between Jef's research and the geomorphological modelling performed at
Leuven.
The final, well illustrated lecture was provided by Jef himself. He demontrated the
importance of using a multi-analysis approach in event correlation instead of a multiproxy
approach, in other terms to take into account all the components of a sediment study
(sedimentology, stratigraphy, chronology) to underline the possible occurrence of thresholds
or delayed responses, and also to avoid miscorrelations.
The afternoon session was chaired by Hans Renssen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).
It provided the opportunity to some of Jef's former PhD students to present their past and
present research.
The presentations were arranged in chronological order, with Kees Kasse, Jef‟s first
PhD Student (1985), as first speaker. Kees presented several case studies of his research
focusing on the connections between fluvial activity, Holocene climate change and vegetation
(palynology). Rene Isarin, who achieved his PhD in 1997, then reported about his job as a
geoarchaeologist (specializing in environmental archaeology) in the Netherlands, presenting
Jef as a necessary complement of Indiana Jones to underline the importance of performing
palaeoenvironmental studies of archaeological contexts. Sasha Keestra (PhD in 2006) brought
us back to the fluvial system, but focusing on present-day activity and the importance of both
field work (including anecdotes derived from recent field work with Jef) and modelling.
In contrast, fluvial archives were the main emphasis in the talk of Freek Busschers
(PhD in 2007), dealing with the Rhine sedimentary complex in the Netherlands. This talk was
illustrated by various 3D animations, providing the opportunity to discover the country "from
all sides", and highlighting the necessary connections between fundamental research on
fluvial archives and applied geosciences.
The last talk was again given by Jef, and offered a well-illustrated overview of his
research worldwide, leading us from America (Surinam, Canada) to Western and Central
Europe (Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Poland etc) and Asia (Indonesia, Siberia, China).
The session was closed by a short speech by Bauke Oudega, the Dean of the Faculty
of Earth Sciences, who honoured Jef's involvement in the administration of the Faculty and
underlined Jef's support of field trips with students.
A friendly reception closed the symposium, which (as during the coffee breaks and
lunch) provided the opportunity for informal discussion amongst participants and, above all,
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to pass informal congratulations to Jef. On behalf of the FLAG community, the executive
board associated itself with all colleagues who attended the meeting, to wish to our past
Chairman a pleasant, fruitful, and definitely 'fluvial' retirement.
Stéphane Cordier
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Jef in the field with his PhD student Xianyan Wang
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FLAG session at INQUA : the programme
Here is the content of Session 53 of INQUA (“Palaeohydrological archives, fluvial
environments and surface-groundwater flow processes”) which was organized jointly by the
FLAG and the GLOCOPH (Global Continental Palaeohydrology) research groups. The
session will take place on Monday (25th) and Tuesday (26th) and include four oral
subsessions (with one invited talk per session) and one poster subsession. The first two
subsessions will be mainy devoted to palaeohydrology, the two last focusing on fluvial
archives. The programme for oral presentations is as follows :
Subsession 1 (Monday 25th, 8.30-10.10)
A.G. Brown - Uplift, Palaeoehydrology and Pleistocene Fluvial Sequences. A Comparison of
Adjacent Catchments in Southern England. (invited talk)
Jian Wang - Estimation of water discharge of Yangtze River at Nanjing reach in the Last
Glaciation Maximum.
Anna Sim - Hydrological variability in the Sydney region: A proxy record constructed from
floodplain sediments of the Hawkesbury–Nepean River, south-east Australia.
Stephen Chilcott - Effects of anthropogenic hydrological change on a dryland river:
investigating the recent history of floodplain lakes (billabongs), Macintyre River, Australia.
Marta Baró - Late Holocene flood frequencies and climate variability in high mountain
environments inferred from Lütschine fan delta sediments, Swiss Alps.
Subsession 2 (Monday 25th, 10.50-12.30)
Leszek Starkel - Rainy periods and floods recorded in continental facies as background for the
Holocene climatostratigraphy (key study from Poland) (invited talk)
Gerardo Benito - Rainfall-runoff modelling and palaeoflood hydrology applied to reconstruct
centennial scale records of flooding and aquifer recharge in ungauged ephemeral rivers
Laurent Devriendt - A 50 ka hydrological record from northern Australia inferred from the
chemistry of ostracod valves: implications for the Australian monsoon
Renzo Valloni - Hydrostratigraphy of Pleistocene alluvial fan and river plain deposits of the
Po foreland basin
Abi Stone - Recharge investigations above the Stampriet Aquifer in semi-arid Namibia using
geochemical methods and environmental tracers; sand, salt and water.
Vincenzo Picotti - Paleohydrology of the Salar de Atacama (Chile) in the last 70 ky from river
terraces and halite cave morphology and deposits.
Poster subsession (Monday 25th, 14.45-15.50)
The list of posters is available at :
http://www.inqua2011.ch/?a=programme&subnavi=abstractlist&sessionid=53
Subsession 3 (Monday 25th, 15.50-17.30)
Cornelis Kasse - Climate-driven fluvial changes and channel-belt abandonment during the last
glacial-interglacial transition (Oude IJssel-Rhine valley, Germany) (invited talk)
David Bridgland - Late Cenozoic Fluvial Archives: evidence for coupling between climate
and landscape evolution
Alessandro Fontana - LGM sedimentation in NE Italy: the continuity of alluvial systems from
the Alpine glaciers to the Adriatic floor
Stéphane Cordier - Geochronological reconstruction of the Pleistocene fluvial incision of the
Moselle River and its main tributaries the Meurthe and Sarre Rivers (France, Germany)
Falko Turner - Late Glacial climatic shifts and fluvial-environmental expressions: a
multidisciplinary case study from middle Elbe river valley, Northern Germany
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Cyril Castanet - Holocene fluvial responses to external drivers in the Northwestern
Mediterranean Africa: contributions of the study of Oued Sebou in the Gharb alluvial plain
(Morocco)
Subsession 4 (Tuesday 26th, 8.30-10.10)
Danielle Schreve - A revised stratigraphy for the early pleistocene terrace sequence of the
Gediz River, western turkey (invited talk)
Alpa Sridhar - Fluvial response to major Holocene climate events: a comparision from river
basins of Gujarat, western India
Bao-tian Pan - The relationship of surface erosion and tectonic uplift in the northern
Qilianshan Mountain, Northwest China.
Toshihiko Sugai - Last 600 ka terrestrial environment changes reconstructed from analysis of
the Uwa Basin-fill Sediment, SW Japan.
Jane Richardson - Climate Change and Holocene Fluvial Activity in Northland, New Zealand
Stephanie Jane Kermode - The limited impact of Quaternary sea level rise on the Shoalhaven
River, southeastern Australia.
We hope to see many of you in Bern!
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Special issue of the FLAG session at INQUA : call for papers
As indicated in our last Newsletter, a special issue will be published after the FLAG session at
the INQUA Meeting to be held in Bern (20-27th July), with David Bridgland and Stéphane
Cordier as guest editors. Following our special issues in Proceedings for Geologists'
Association and Geomorphology, this publication will take place in the journal
"Geomorphologie : relief, processus, environnement", which is the journal of the French
group of Geomorphology and publishes papers both in French and in English. More
information about the journal and the instructions to authors can be found at :
http://geomorphologie.revues.org/index701.html#tocto1n2
We invite all the colleagues who will present either a poster or an oral communication in the
session 53 of INQUA (“Palaeohydrological archives, fluvial environments and surface-
groundwater flow processes”) to propose a publication. The schedule for this special issue is
as follows :
-31th July 2011 : deadline for declaration of interest. This should be done by sending an e-
mail to Stephane Cordier ([email protected] or [email protected]), providing
a title and author list.
-31th october 2011 : deadline for manuscript submission
-Summer/Autumn 2012 : publication of the special issue.
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FLAG business meeting at INQUA
The FLAG session (“Palaeohydrological archives, fluvial environments and surface-
groundwater flow processes”) will be held in Bern on Monday, 25th and Tuesday, 26th of
July. Following our tradition a business meeting will be organized (detailed timing and place
provided during the INQUA Meeting). The Business Meeting should in particular include the
following points :
-question of the participation to the next EGU Meetings
-participation to other symposiums
-relations between FLAG, GLOCOPH, and LUCIFS (see information about LUCIFS below)
Even if you are not able to attend the INQUA Meeting feel free to contact David Bridgland
for any suggestions of point to be debated at the occasion.
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Palaeoflood Session at INQUA : the programme
As previously announced, there will also be a session titled « Palaeofloods in Earth‟s history »
at INQUA 2011. The poster presentation will take place on Tuesday, 26th of July (14.30-
15.30 hrs), while the oral presentations will be given on Wednesday, 27th (08.30 – 12.30 hrs).
To fill the gap between the poster and the oral presentations during the final hours of the
congress, the convenors organised an informal meeting after the poster presentation in a
beergarden near the conference hall (so make sure not to miss the poster session!).
According to the available information by the end of May 2011, the following oral
presentations will be given:
Samuel Toucanne: Pleistocene Fleuve Manche palaeoriver discharges: response to glacial
oscillations and climate changes (invited talk)
Janine Meinsen: Middle Pleistocene lake outburst floods in the Münsterland Embayment
(NW Germany): magnitudes and impacts
Petteri Alho: 2-D hydraulic modeling of the largest Glacial Lake Missoula draining(s)
Paul Carling:Megaflood sedimentation in the Altai Mountains of Siberia: what can we learn
about generic processes?
Valery Zemtsov: Simulation of hydraulic characteristics of diluvial floods from the Chuya
and Kuray glacial-dammed lakes in the late post glacial, Altai, Russia
Andres Diez-Herrero: Using scars on trees for roughness calibration of floodplain and
palaeoflood reconstruction with hydraulic modelling
Tina Swierczynski: High variability of European floods during the last 4000 years: A seasonal
record of runoff events from varved sediments of Lake Mondsee (Upper Austria) (invited
talk)
Lothar Schulte: Trying to understand mountain flood dynamics from multi-proxy data: a
4600-year high resolution record from the Swiss Alps
Hongbo Zheng: Holocene Flooding History in the Yangtze River Drainage as Recorded by
Subaqueous Delta Sediments
Chunchang Huang: Extraordinary Floods Occurred during the Holocene Climatic Events in
the Qishuihe River Valley, Middle Reaches of the Yellow River, China
Mateja Ferk: Holocene paleofloods on the Planina karst polje, Slovenia
Libor Elleder: Historic floods in the city of Prague – a reconstruction of peak discharges
All poster presentations are given in a review at:
http://www.inqua2011.ch/?a=programme&subnavi=abstractlist&sessionid=90
Also a special issue on the session‟s topic will be published in the journal « Hydrology
Research » (http://www.iwaponline.com/nh/default.htm). Deadline for announcements of
interest to submit a contribution is July, 2011 (during the conference). Anyhow, you are
welcome to make such declaration already in advance by sending an email to Neil Macdonald
([email protected]). Manuscripts must be submitted by the end of October,
2011, while the entire 2-course review process will be finished by April 2012, when the final
version will be submitted to the publisher.
In case of any question on the session, please do not hesitate to contact either Juergen Herget
([email protected]) or Neil Macdonald ([email protected]).
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Information about the LUCIFS research group
In large parts of the world, Holocene fluvial systems are characterised by strong human
impacts. Such impacts range from deforestation and cultivation of the hinterland (sometimes
already in pre-historic times) to engineering of fluvial systems later on. In many cases, these
impacts altered the rivers to completely human-dominated systems. Since rivers are
evolutionary systems and their present day functioning is strongly dependent on their history,
a complete understanding of fluvial change often requires a long-time perspective - centuries
to millennia - derived from palaeofluvial, documentary and archaeological records. The
IGBP-PAGES program LUCIFS (Land Use and Climate Impacts on Fluvial Systems) is a
global network of researchers that study the long-term impact of humans on fluvial systems.
LUCIFS is focusing on reconstructing fluvial environments during the period of agriculture,
thereby integrating records on the history of human activity, climate and fluvial change. The
main aim is to understand fluvial change in response to external forcings (climate and
humans). Questions that are considered are (amongst many more): can we decipher between
the impact of climate and the impact of land use on fluvial systems? When did anthropogenic
effects first occur? How do we deal with autogenic adjustments and internal feedbacks in
fluvial systems that obscure the external signal? What are the total quantities of sediment
(with nutrients such as P, N, and C) reaching the coast?
Just like in 2009 and 2010, LUCIFS organised a session at the 2011 EGU general assembly,
which was held in Vienna from April 3rd
to April 8th. The LUCIFS session „The changing
geomorphic effectiveness of hydrologic events‟ was co-chaired by LUCIFS-members
Andreas Lang (the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom) and Bastiaan Notebaert
(University of Leuven, Belgium). The well-visited session allowed scientists from
geomorphology, hydrology, climatology, geo-archaeology and environmental history to meet
each other and to discuss the presented results. This year‟s focus was the increase in
hydrologic and mass-movement events (floods, debris floods, flash floods, debris flows, snow
avalanches, rockfalls, landslides, etc.) as result of increasing human pressure on the landscape.
In addition, changes in climate, sediment availability and other factors affect the impact
magnitude and recurrence of hydrological events and leads to changing magnitude-frequency
relationships. The oral presentations covered a wide range of subjects, including
reconstructions of snow avalanches using tree rings, and studies on debris flow databases. For
LUCIFS- and FLAG-members alike, the most interesting presentations came from
Aleksander Borejsza who showed that prehispanic agriculture not only affected the hillslopes
in Mexico, but also the fluvial valley floors. Annegret Larsen studied the development and
stratigraphy of a German gully system in detail, and identified several periods of erosion and
accumulation, which relate to high-magnitude/low-frequency storm events until human
occupation during the Late Holocene became more important. Muñoz-Salinas used a portable
OSL reader for her study on fluvial sedimentation resulting from the arrival of Europeans in
Australia. The oral session was followed by an extensive poster session with 18 contributions.
As a follow-up, LUCIFS is organising a session at the INQUA meeting in Bern, which is
conveniently scheduled for Tuesday the 26th of July, right after the FLAG session. The
LUCIFS session, with the title „Quantifying and modelling human and climatic impacts on
hillslope and fluvial sediment dynamics during the Holocene‟ gives the latest results on the
human impact and sediment dynamics relation, including both field and modelling studies.
The bi-annual LUCIFS workshop will directly follow the INQUA meeting. During the three
day workshop (July 28th
to July 30th
) at the university of Bern, we will discuss the changes in
(fluvial) sediment and carbon fluxes under human impact and climate change, in a series of
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presentations, working group meetings and in the field. If you want to join this workshop,
please visit the LUCIFS website (http://www.lucifs.uni-bonn.de/) for more information about
registration.
We hope to see you in Bern!
Thomas Hoffmann, chairman (Bonn University, Germany)
Gilles Erkens, secretary/co-chair (Utrecht University/Dutch Geological Survey, The
Netherlands)
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Geologists’ Association meeting on Geoconservation
FLAG members might be interested in a meeting in Worcester, UK, organized by the
Geologists‟ Association (9 and 10 September 2011), entitled: “GEOCONSERVATION FOR
SCIENCE AND SOCIETY: AN AGENDA FOR THE 21ST CENTURY”. The Quaternary
Research Association and the British Society for Geomorphology are joint sponsors. FLAG
Chairman David Bridgland is a co-organizer.
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For your agenda : FLAG 2012 in Luxemburg
FLAG members are reminded that our next meeting will take place in Luxemburg between
the 2nd and the 7th of September 2012. The two-days of presentations will be followed by a
three-day excursion jumping the border between Luxemburg, France and Germany. More
information will be provided in a subsequent newsletter.
The Luxembourgian Moselle valley North of Schengen
