Mehmet Korhan Erturaç (PhD)

Bio

I am a Quaternary Goelogist dealing with the earth surface processes in affect for the last 2.58 million years of Earth's history. Quaternary Geology covers only a very small portion of the geological timescale of the Earth. This may sound complicated or simple to you. Think of all possible natural phenomenon that happens everyday and occasionally maybe once in your life time. Our earth have faced these events thousand of times in regular basis where some major shifts which  written history has not witnessed yet.

One of the main principles of the geology states that the face of the earth changes gradually, continents collide at a very slow rate (mm/cm per year) which we can only measure for just 30 years or so. This causes major earthquakes that rupture the surface and shifting the land generally happen once or twice in every millennia. The earth goes into glacial periods which last for 100 thousand years (ka) causing polar glacier advance, lowering the sea level significantly, and causing the rivers erode deeply in their valleys and plains trying to reach further to the sea (that even the weariest river do so).

Everything is connected, every piece of sand matter to understand what happened in the past. A Quaternary Geologist is lucky because the sedimentary record is almost complete and we can access many types of record (cores from lake and sea bottom, cores of ice from glacier caps, cave stalagmites, river deposits, moraines formed by glaciers and so on). A QG deciphers this data with a unique perspective to model the events and environmental conditions of the past.

We investigate the past to understand the future of our changing world on the verge of the Anthropocene.

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