Dr Becky Briant

Contact details  

Department of Geography, Environment & Development Studies
Birkbeck College
University of London
Malet Street
London, WC1E 7HX
Tel: 020 7631 6455
Email: b.briant@bbk.ac.uk
BA (Cambridge) – Geography, 1996
MSc (Royal Holloway) – Quaternary Science, 1998
Ph.D. (Cambridge) – Fluvial Responses to Rapid Climate Change in Eastern England during the last glacial period, 2002

Research Interests

I am interested in large-scale, long-term river behaviour. To date I have been involved in a number of projects reconstructing past river system behaviour during the Quaternary period by identifying and dating phases of activity using multiple dating techniques:

• 1998-2002 – Newnham College-funded research on the Devensian history of the Nene and Welland in the Fenland Basin (Ph.D.; Briant et al., 2004a,b,c,d; 2005; 2008). This detected catchment-level patterns in river activity and cross-compared optically-stimulated luminescence (OSL) and radiocarbon dating for the first time in British fluvial sequences (Briant & Bateman, in press).
• 2003 ongoing - English Heritage-funded ‘Palaeolithic Archaeology of the Sussex / Hampshire Coastal Corridor’ (PASHCC) project, in collaboration with Martin Bates (Lampeter) and Francis Wenban-Smith (Southampton). This dated previously undateable deposits using the OSL technique, providing a robust regional geological framework for the important Palaeolithic archaeology in this region (Briant et al., 2006a). We have also reinvestigated key interglacial sequences in the region, such as at Stone Point, Lepe Country Park. This region will be the location for a Quaternary Research Association Field Meeting in April 2009 (Briant et al., 2009).
• 2005 ongoing - the Medway Valley Palaeolithic Project (MVPP), also funded by English Heritage and with Francis Wenban-Smith and Martin Bates. We have used OSL and amino-acid racemisation (AAR) dating techniques to build an integrated geological and geochronological framework for Thames-Medway deposits in eastern Essex (Wenban-Smith et al., 2007; Briant et al., 2008).

In addition to these projects and various smaller dating projects testing new methodologies, I am now developing a project with John Wainwright (Sheffield) combining the geological record with numerical modelling, looking at both past and future climate change. Most future river-basin-scale predictions focus on water, assuming minimal sediment movement. It is, however, crucial to understand climate-driven flows of both sediment and water within river basins. This project will do this at three nested timescales – the last interglacial-glacial cycle, the Holocene and into the future using Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate commitment scenarios to the year 3000. The value added by this research will lie in understanding how rivers behave and what causes them to change, providing a context for predictions by planners and policy-makers. Numerical models are crucial to understanding these relationships over long timescales, because they are physically based, enabling us to more directly test the relationship between river behaviour and climate.