Presseinformation: Cosmic rays reveal hidden history of Australia’s ancient landscapes

Nr. 3 - 14.01.2026

International research team with Göttingen University unlocks new “cosmic clock” for deep time

Australia’s iconic red landscapes have preserved a remarkable record of Earth’s surface evolution – one that can now be read using cosmic rays from outer space. An international research team including the Universities of Göttingen and Cologne in Germany, as well as Curtin University in Australia, has demonstrated a new method to reconstruct how ancient landscapes eroded and sediments moved across continents millions of years ago. By measuring tiny amounts of gas produced by cosmic rays inside grains of sand, the researchers were able to quantify erosion rates and sediment transport times in landscapes far older than previously possible. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Cosmic rays constantly bombard Earth, triggering miniature nuclear reactions when they strike minerals near the planet’s surface. These reactions create particles known as “cosmogenic nuclides”, which act as natural clocks recording how long minerals have been exposed at the Earth’s surface. Until now, most cosmogenic nuclides used by geologists were radioactive and decayed too quickly to study landscapes older than a few million years. The new study overcomes this limitation by using stable cosmogenic krypton preserved in zircon – one of Earth’s most durable minerals.

The researchers analyzed zircon crystals extracted from drill cores up to 50 m deep in southern Australia. The study area is home to some of the world’s largest zircon deposits hosted in ancient beaches that, due to sea-level changes, are now far away from the coast. By combining cosmogenic krypton measurements with other geochemical and mineralogical data, the team reconstructed the evolution of a vast ancient landscape dating back around 40 million years. The results reveal extraordinarily slow erosion, in some cases less than one meter per million years, and show that sediments spent more than a million years being transported and stored before final burial along the coast.

“These zircon grains are tiny time capsules,” explains lead author Dr Maximilian Dröllner, Lecturer at Göttingen University and Research Fellow at Curtin University. “They record how long sediment lingered near Earth’s surface, allowing us to quantify landscape stability and sediment transport in deep time. What surprised us was just how slowly these ancient Australian landscapes were changing – comparable to some of the most stable regions on Earth today, such as the Atacama Desert or Antarctica’s Dry Valleys.”

The new method opens a window into how landscapes responded to past climate change, tectonic movements and sea-level fluctuations over millions of years. “Because krypton and zircon are both stable, this technique can be applied far beyond the reach of existing methods,” says Dröllner. “It allows us to investigate key moments in Earth’s history, such as major climate transitions, and to understand how these events reshaped landscape stability and geochemical cycles on our planet.”

Original publication: Dröllner M et al., “Ancient landscape evolution tracked through cosmogenic krypton in detrital zircon”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2516058122

A article by Dr Maximilian Dröllner about this research can be found here:  A ‘cosmic clock’ in tiny crystals has revealed the rise and fall of Australia’s ancient landscapes

Contact:

Dr Maximilian Dröllner

University of Göttingen

Geoscience Center

Goldschmidtstraße 3, 37077 Göttingen, Germany

Email: maximilian.droellner@uni-goettingen.de

Tel: +49 (0)551 39-27984

www.uni-goettingen.de/en/699390.html

And:

Curtin University

Timescales of Mineral Systems Group

Curtin’s Frontier Institute for Geoscience Solutions

Bentley, WA 6102, Australia

https://staffportal.curtin.edu.au/staff/profile/view/maximilian-droellner-3eb7b4b6/