Welcome to the page of the 14CHRONO Centre! Here we post our news and events, as well as other interesting and useful information.
Here's a visualisation of radiocarbon decay, projected onto a fossil Giant Deer antler. The flashes and pops are decay events. Photo by Thorsten Kahlert, fossil provided by Dick Mol, animation by Maarten Blaauw.
Congratulations to former ArcPal MSc student Dr Gabriella Weiss and to Dr Jon Lewis (Loughborough University) for co-leading a paper on Holocene palaeoenvironmental reconstructions based on sediment from the Limfjord, Denmark! Data from Gabriella's MSc thesis is part of the study - including AMS radiocarbon dates of coarse.
The paper is available open access from Boreas at
09/07/2026
Many congratulations to Dr Gosse Bootsma on the publication of his first article, which was co-authored with Professor Maarten Blaauw and his other supervisors from the University of Aberdeen.
The paper entitled 'Determining the growth rate of Sphagnum magellanicum Brid. in the Falkland Islands using radiocarbon dating' is published Open Access and you can read it at the link below:
Determining the growth rate of Sphagnum magellanicum Brid. in the Falkland Islands using radiocarbon dating The growth rate of Sphagnum L. is of great interest due to the key role it plays in carbon sequestration in peatlands. Methods currently used to determine this growth rate all have limitations. The...
Some new research testing the application of ramped pyrolysis radiocarbon dating to ancient plasters from the Mediterranean. Led by Pinar Erdil of CIO, University of Groningen, who we were very happy to host and collaborate with on this project.
Erdil et al. 2026 Ramped pyrolysis radiocarbon dating: First application to Bronze and Iron Age plaster from the Eastern Mediterranean (ca. 1500-800 BCE). Journal of Archaeological Science doi:10.1016/j.jas.2026.106611
19/05/2026
Many congratulations to Elisabetta Dixon, who passed her PhD viva yesterday on annual radiocarbon calibration data over the 8.2 ka event with a Bayesian approach to dendrochronology. Her multidisciplinary project which combined cutting slices of fossil pine with complicated chemistry and long mathematical coding sessions, was supervised by Maarten Blaauw, Gill Plunkett and David Brown, and examined by Neil Loader (Swansea University) and Gerard Barrett. We're excited to see what she'll be doing next!
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/bor.70048
A recent paper by Mike Simms (National Museums NI) and Paula Reimer (14CHRONO,QUB) on post-glacial sea-level in eastern Northern Ireland using radiocarbon dates on limpets has just been published open access in Boreas.