Scientific Interests:

• Reconstructing climate from sedimentary archives
• Signal propagation
• Earth surface processes
• Landscape evolution

Methods:

• Multivariate statistics on compositional data
• Forcing-response modeling from sedimentary archives

Education:

I am a sedimentologist interested in the response of earth-surface processes to climate change. I study marine and terrestrial deposits to infer process models from the sedimentary records.

For my doctoral thesis, I analyze the response of sediment-routing systems to climate change in Western Sumatra. I focus on rapid climate change (specifically increased precipitation) during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. My PhD project is based on analyzing multiple late Quaternary sediment records spanning the last 14 ka from the Mentawai Basin, offshore Sumatra.

To assess changes in sediment flux and composition, I combine quantitative and qualitative approaches. I estimate sediment fluxes using volumetric sediment budgets (based on echo-soundings). Changes in the sediment composition are inferred from analyzing high-resolution elemental compositions (XRF) using multivariate statistics. I apply an inverse modeling approach based on the theory of dynamical systems to disentangle climate forcing from transient landscape adaptation.

You can find more information about the Sumatra Project here: “The impact of precipitation changes on terrigenous sediment export to the Indian Ocean”

Conference abstracts:

Mosser, S., Bernhardt, A., Mohtadi, M., and Schwenk, T.: Transient landscape response to abrupt precipitation increase at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, offshore Sumatra, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, vPICO

Mosser, S., Hartmann, K., and Diekmann, B.: Resilience of a Subarctic catchment to climate change, EGU General Assembly 2019, 07-12 Apr 2019, Poster