Global warming and a progressively drier climate in many parts of the world are causing more dust storms. To predict how these storms are caused, researchers are looking into the past to understand where the dust came from, for how long, and over what distances it was transported. An international research team led by Dr. Aditi K. Dave and Professor Kathryn Fitzsimmons from the Department of Geosciences at the University of Tübingen, along with colleagues from Romania, Brazil, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, have now developed a new method of doing this. They look at irregular sites—called “defect centers”—in the crystal structure of the mineral quartz, which frequently appears in sediments. Their study has been published in Geophysical Research Letters.
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Source: Phys.org