Paleoceanography and Sedimentology

Focus of our working group are paleoceanographic and sedimentological questions clustered around the development of shallow and marginal seas. Generally, we investigate sea floor sediments (surface sediments and a large variety of sediment cores) to reconstruct past depositional and paleoenvironmental conditions. Special emphasis lies on the postglacial history of the Baltic Sea. The particularity of this and other marginal seas requires, in many cases, an adjustment of established and the development of new paleoenvironmental proxies. One promising way is to calibrate the sedimentary proxies with long instrumental time series. This demands for accurate chronostratigraphies of the topmost sediments. By combining various micropaleontological, sedimentological, and (inorganic and organic) geochemical methods to so-called multi-proxy approaches we seek to understand the environmental responses to external (e.g. climate, ice sheet dynamics, sea level, tectonics), and for the most recent past also to anthropogenic forcing. Our research activities are embedded in the IOWs research foci RF1 and RF3.

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