Dating Facilities

The School of Earth and Environmental Sciences has an internationally regarded Thermoluminescence (TL) dating Laboratory capable of providing sedimentary ages using quartz sand back to about 400,000 years. TL dating has been established at Wollongong for several years, under the leadership of David Price, and the School is widely regarded within Australia and overseas in this field.

TL is complemented by other dating techniques, one of the most established being amino acid racemisation, under the direction of Colin Murray-Wallace.

More recently the School has embarked on setting up a laboratory for Optically Stimulated Luminescence. OSL is more sensitive to zeroing of the dating clock, and can verify or add to the chronology derived from TL and other techniques.

GeoQuEST works in close collaboration with ANSTO, and has access to a wide range of radiometric techniques such as uranium-series dating, cesium-137 dating and lead-210 dating through Dr Henk Heijnis and accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dating through Dr Claudio Tuniz.