Sandra M. Braumann is a Ph.D. candidate based in Vienna, Austria. She is enrolled in a doctoral program named “Transitions to Sustainability” centered at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) and is co-supervised by Joerg M. Schaefer. Sandra holds a Master’s degree in Civil Engineering and Water Management and works at BOKU’s Institute of Applied Geology. Since 2014, Sandra has repeatedly visited Lamont’s Cosmogenic Isotope Group and has been taught the extraction of cosmogenic nuclides from rock samples. During her Master’s Program, she was engaged in a project, which aims to generate a chronology of the Pleistocene terrace staircase in the Vienna Basin. The application of isochron burial dating using the isotope pair 26Al and 10Be allowed to assign an absolute age to one of the terrace bodies identified in the Vienna Basin. For her Ph.D., Sandra has switched to higher elevations and to younger time scales. She now focuses on the reconstruction of Holocene glacier fluctuations in the Austrian Alps. Geomorphological mapping combined with low-level 10Be surface exposure dating is applied to former ice margins and elucidates glacier change on the geological time scale. This long-term record is complemented with information from historical sources and instrumental time series, which reflect glacier evolution throughout the past centuries and decades. This approach allows insights into natural climate variability during the past 11,700 years. Glacier and climate reconstructions are instrumental for placing the ongoing man-made warming trend into a long-term perspective and for communicating the magnitude of anthropogenic impact on the climate system.
Alumni