Recycling on Earth for more than 3 billion years

16 July 2019 / Grenoble / Kiel. Only 100 years ago Alfred Wegener developed the theory of continental drift. However, the associated recycling process of crustal material began much earlier than previously thought. An international team of scientists with the participation of the GEOMAR Helmholtz Ce...

Group photo. Photo: Bradley Weymer, GEOMAR.

Groundwater at the sea floor

15 July 2019 / Msida / Kiel.The search for groundwater at the sea floor is becoming more and more important in arid coastal regions. Students and lecturers from 12 countries met last week in Malta for a Maltese-German summer school on this topic. This summer school was co-organized by the GEOMAR Hel...

Along the North Anatolian Fault, Anatolia and the Eurasian Earth Plate push past each other. Image reproduced from the GEBCO world map 2014, www.gebco.net

Istanbul: Seafloor study proves earthquake risk for the first time

08 July 2019 / Kiel. Istanbul with its more than 15 million inhabitants is located in close proximity to the North Anatolian fault, a boundary between two major tectonic plates. Fre-quently devastating earthquakes occur along the fault. But the fault section off the coast of Istanbul has so far only...

Currently, organic material in the ocean is mainly degraded with oxygen (left). Together with a warming of the ocean this leads to deoxygenation. In a future, warmer ocean (right), more organic material is respirated by denitrification with nitrate. The associated oxygen saving would even exceed the oxygen loss due to warming. Graphic: Rita Erven/GEOMAR

The far–future ocean: warm yet oxygen-rich

27 June 2019 / Kiel. The higher the temperature, the less gases are dissolved in the water— this simple physical relationship explains, among other things, the measurable loss of oxygen in the warming ocean. In the international journal Nature Communications, however, scientists from the GEOMAR Helm...