Permalink: https://agate.academy/id/PR437

Frühwarnsysteme für globale Umweltveränderungen

Within the framework of the marine and polar research programmes funded by the Federal Government, many gaps in basic knowledge about the sea as an ecosystem and the links between the oceans and climate development have been closed, especially in recent years. Cooperation with partners from the former Eastern Bloc has considerably expanded the research opportunities, which has had an extraordinarily positive effect on the overall understanding of the complex environmental and climate problems. A large number of interdisciplinary and transnational research projects, which have been and will be carried out in close coordination and cooperation with the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), have made a significant contribution to this. The results of these projects underline in particular the importance of the Eurasian continental margin as a sensitive indicator of global environmental change and thus as a key region for climate research. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the actual relationships and feedback processes of this closely linked land/ocean system, which could be used to estimate possible future impacts of climate change. An important prerequisite for this is access to secure basic information archived in national and international databases (e.g. Bremerhaven, Hohenheim, Boulder). The project applied for here should therefore play a central role in the processing and evaluation of the primary data obtained at various locations.

Within the framework of the planned academy project, which will focus on natural climate archives of the Eurasian continental margin, close cooperation with the existing database on terrestrial palaeoclimatology at the University of Hohenheim and the database PANGEA for marine sediments at the AWI will be sought. The establishment of an own database is not planned. Rather, innovative work will be carried out on existing and new data material. This also includes the application of new climate models and knowledge to existing data sets. The function of the working group is thus to be seen as a link between the German climate databases and other international data archives. The focus here is on good contacts with scientific experts in the Russian Federation. The data already available there needs to be fairly valued, possibly even reassessed (e.g. with the aid of modern dating methods). The Academy project stands out from the annotated data collections of the databases in terms of its objectives and at the same time represents a sensible and necessary addition.

Running time
2003-2015
Project type
Data Repository

Contact person for the academies' programme

Sebastian Zwies M.A.

Geschäftsstelle Mainz
Union der deutschen Akademien der Wissenschaften
Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 2
55131 Mainz

Tel: 06131/218 528-17
E-Mail: sebastian.zwies@akademienunion.de