Louise Fuchs is a PhD candidate in the Organic Geochemistry group since 2020.
One of the best continental paleoclimate archives is hosted in the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP), where cycles of warm, wet interglacials and cool, dry glacials have been recorded in a sequence of alternating layers of loess and paleosol. In this project, Louise uses long-chain n-alkanes from leaf waxes of higher plants stored in several loess-paleosol sequences of the CLP to find out how vegetation responded to climatic changes in the past. Specifically, the carbon isotopic composition of the n-alkanes is used to differentiate between C3 and C4 vegetation, and their hydrogen isotopic composition is used as a measure for the composition of meteoric water. Louise aims to identify the climatic drivers of vegetation change on the CLP.