Activities

A large team of Tunisian, UK, Swiss and Austrian based participants will be doing our second field season in the “loess” plateau of Jebel Dahar between Mednine and Tataouine. Loess is silty dust which accumulates on the landscape during relatively dry periods. The material is mostly mineral dust, produced from erosion sometimes hundreds of kilometers away. We will date the section using OSL, and extract information about which direction the wind was blowing at that time using geochemistry to fingerprint the silt grains. 

 We are hoping to sample two new sites to compare to our main location in the north of the loess deposit (the loess area is shown on the map below).  The sites are in the arid southern region of Tunisia, but our 2022 field mission experienced a day of heavy rain. The flowers that came out in the days following were lovely, but it did cause us a big problem when the loess surface became soft and very slippery!