Establishing robust and precise chronologies is fundamental to understanding environmental and climatic dynamics throughout the Quaternary period. Over the past decades, geochronological techniques - such as trapped charge dating (luminescence and electron spin resonance), cosmogenic nuclides, among others - have greatly advanced in terms of precision, accuracy, and broader applicability. These methods now provide crucial insights into the timing, duration, frequency, and intensity of Earth surface processes across a wide variety of environmental and geological settings. Such insights are essential for disentangling complex Earth system interactions and for contextualizing present-day climate trends within long-term natural variability. This contribution will focus on the advancements and practical applications of dating techniques in Quaternary archives. Special attention will be given to the role of trapped charge dating methods applied to diverse climatic and geomorphic settings. By aligning different chronological frameworks, more coherent and reliable reconstructions of past environmental change and landscape evolution can be developed. Ultimately, improved temporal frameworks enhance our ability to understand the mechanisms, thresholds, and feedbacks driving environmental change. This contribution aims to highlight current challenges, emerging tools, and future directions in Quaternary geochronology from selected case studies, underlining its central role in geosciences.

Anthropogenic soil erosion has shaped European agricultural landscapes since thousands of years. Reconstructing their past dynamics is crucial for understanding associated driving and feedback mechanisms as a basis for numerical models that predict future trends. While colluvial deposits provide abundant records of Holocene soil erosion, their use for reconstructing spatial and temporal patterns is limited by poorly-resolved and low-resolution chronologies. For colluvial deposits from a loess landscape at the southeastern rim of the Lower Rhine Area, we show how unprecedented high-resolution chronologies can be constructed using a portable optically stimulated luminescence (pOSL) reader in combination with conventional OSL dating and Bayesian age modelling. The resulting cm-scale chronologies for the past ~3500 years reveal unique insights into colluvium formation by capturing variations in deposition rates over several orders of magnitude. These variations include phases with virtually absent erosion and several hundred years duration in the Early Middle Ages, but also short episodes or even single events with drastically accelerated erosion during Roman Times and the Late Middle Ages. Within the loess-derived colluvium of our study site the pOSL-based dating approach also offers huge possibilities for upscaling, since additional colluvium cores can be dated with little effort once a robust relation between pOSL and conventional OSL has been established. This approach sets the foundation for reconstructing not only temporal but also spatial patterns of local soil erosion dynamics with exceptional resolution.

River terraces are key archives of landscape evolution, shaped by the interplay of climatic, tectonic, and geomorphic processes. While often treated as regionally synchronous responses to glacial-interglacial cycles, growing evidence suggests that their formation can be far more complex and spatially variable. This study contributes to the broader understanding of terrace genesis by presenting new data from the Guadix-Baza Basin in southeastern Spain—a region marked by active faulting, significant elevation contrasts, and a long history of fluvial reorganization.

Initially a closed intramontane basin, Guadix-Baza evolved into an open drainage system during the Middle to Late Pleistocene due to river capture. This transition, combined with sustained neotectonic activity—especially along the Baza Fault system—led to the formation of multiple, spatially discontinuous terrace levels. Traditionally, terrace chronologies have relied on single-point dating approaches. In contrast, our study employs high-resolution luminescence dating across a wide range of sites to reconstruct the temporal structure of terrace development.

The results reveal a non-uniform fluvial response that cannot be attributed to simple climatic or tectonic forcing alone. Instead, terrace formation reflects a complex mosaic of local controls, including differential uplift, sediment supply, and basin morphology. Apparent chronological inconsistencies between sites can be reconciled within a stratigraphically and tectonically informed model of landscape evolution. Our findings underscore the necessity of integrating detailed field observations with robust geochronological frameworks to adequately capture the complexity of river terrace formation.

We present results of our Gibraltar project which intends to provide a speleothem based palaeoclimatic framework for the western Mediterranean realm over the last half-million years. Gibraltar climate is influenced by the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean in a boundary area between polar and subtropical air masses. Speleothem proxy records from Gibraltar provide opportunities to improve understanding of the long-term interplay of climatic features of this key location at the southern limit of tracks presently taken by the North Atlantic depressions delivering rainfall to Europe.

Here we focus on a composite record based on five speleothems: two from near present sea level in Ragged Staff Cave and three from an altitude of 255 masl in St. Michaels Cave. The composite chronology is constrained by over 260 U-Th dates and reveals a near continuous δ¹³C_calcite, δ¹⁸O_calcite and trace element proxy record for the last 200 ka. Extensive cave monitoring results provide a robust foundation for palaeoclimate interpretations of the proxy data. The Gibraltar δ¹⁸O record shows clear imprints of Alboran Sea SST for the last 200 ka and is strikingly similar to NGRIP but with a range of variation notably more subdued than other long speleothem records like Soreq or Hulu that appear to have insolation forcing of monsoon strength as their dominant control. We interpret the Gibraltar δ¹⁸O record with respect to changes in cave temperatures, ocean δ¹⁸O and isotopic disequilibrium during calcite deposition. The Gibraltar δ¹³C record is interpreted as signaling changes in vegetation and water balance.

While the marine realm provides quasi-continuous sediment records back into the Tertiary, terrestrial environmental and climatic archives are more complex, fragmentary and commonly short, i.e. they often provide evidence of just one interglacial. Sediment sequences comprising several glacial-interglacial cycles in superposition are exceptions and often encountered in crater basins. The sediment sequence from Rodderberg near Bonn, a paleolake record from a closed crater basin, provides such a record with several organic-rich (interglacial) intervals. A total of 86 luminescence ages was determined for numerical dating at two different laboratories. Furthermore, tephrochronology provides key markers, while cyclostratigraphy, applying the global marine stable isotope stack (LR05), expands this chronological approach. It is hypothesized that the archive spans the past 440 ka. However, the results obtained are of a surprising nature and will prompt further investigation.

The detection of sedimentological and elemental signatures from depositional records with high spatial resolution has become a standard since the advent of sediment scanning techniques. The example of Rodderberg is provided to demonstrate the potential of such high-resolution proxy data. However, correlating these natural archives in space and time requires reliable age/depth models, which are only available for the last two glacial-interglacial cycles. For older records of the entire Middle Pleistocene, the chronologies remain as running targets. In order to resolve the existing inconsistencies between sites and regions, further efforts are required to enhance numerical dating techniques. This can be achieved by extending the temporal range of luminescence dating and by refining radiometric dating methodologies.