Alexander Francke

My research is driven to answer questions about how our environment, climate, and landscape has changed on geological time scales. These time scales can last thousands to millions of years, but I am also in particular interested on how humans interact with the surrounding landscape since the emerge of permanent settlements, farming, and pasturing.

I look at the sedimentary and chemical composition of lake deposits to answer these questions. Lakes provide excellent archives of how the environment has changed since their formation. It is as easy as comparing two lakes from the tropic and artic today: The climate and environment controls will control how the sediment in the lake basin will look like.