Development of luminescence imaging to trace Wadden Sea nourishment sand

Luminescence is a powerful tool for dating the burial age of sediments, and it has potential applications for sediment tracing. The method uses light sensitive signals that accumulates in grains while buried, and a main assumption for dating is that the targeted signal has been reset by light exposure (e.g., during transport) prior to burial. Insufficient signal resetting (i.e., poor bleaching) is undesired for luminescence dating but can be of value for luminescence tracing. As different luminescence signals reset at different rates, comparison of these signals yields information about the duration and mode of transport (Reimann et al., 2015). Within our NWO funded TRAILS project, we develop and validate novel luminescence tracing methods and apply them to trace the dispersion of the nourished sands in the Ameland inlet of the Wadden Sea on a basin- and site-scale. The rationale of our approach is that nourished and native grains can be distinguished by different luminescence signal resetting related to their different source and transport histories.