PhD defense Rasmus Fenger-Nielsen

On Monday 18 May, CENPERM has seen its first online PhD defense: Rasmus Fenger-Nielsen has successfully defended his PhD thesis “Archaeological sites threatened by climate change – a regional perspective from Greenland”. In his PhD thesis, Rasmus has investigated archaeological finds in five key sites in the Nuuk region, Greenland.

For these archaeological sites, Rasmus has used drone imagery to analyse vegetation cover at and around archaeological sites and has investigated vegetation and soil properties with in situ measurements to investigate differences between the sites and their surroundings. He finds the sites to be hotspots for vegetation and soil nutrients, despite the fact that the sites have been abandoned centuries ago. The difference in vegetation cover is visible from remotely sensed data, which gives opportunities for detection of archaeological sites from satellite imagery.

In the final paper of the PhD thesis, Rasmus combines the results from different potential threats into an assessment of the multiple factors that threaten archaeological finds, such as microbial degradation, coastal erosion and permafrost thaw. He shows that the combination of threats has increasing impacts on archaeological sites in the coming century.

The PhD research by Rasmus was part of the REMAINS project at the National Museum of Denmark, and was supervised by head of CENPERM Bo Elberling, Jørgen Hollesen and Aart Kroon.

Congratulations, Rasmus!