news 2024

Led by the University of Bremen, RWTH paleoclimate researcher Professor Thorsten Bauersachs and colleagues have now published their results on the glaciation of West Antarctica in the journal Science Advances. It has been more than 30 million years since West Antarctica was last largely ice-free. In the last 30 million years, however, it has been extensively glaciated.

Research team compares wild bee networks at a small scale and at landscape level   Traditionally, interactions between plants and their pollinators are analysed on the basis of visits to flowers. A research team led by the University of Göttingen studied wild bees on chalk grassland. The researchers analysed both the networks showing visits to flowers and the networks where pollen was transported.

A team of researchers at the Universities of Tübingen and Göttingen has found that certain minerals with characteristic shapes could indicate the activity of bacteria in hydrothermal vents - or black smokers - in the deep ocean several billion years ago. This represents a major step in our understanding of the origin of life.

Newly discovered symbiosis probably plays a major role in marine nitrogen fixation Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology have discovered a new partnership between a marine diatom and a bacterium that can account for a large share of nitrogen fixation in vast regions of the ocean.

Special features of the Arctic climate, such as the strong reflection of the sun's rays off the light snow or the low position of the sun, amplify global warming in the Arctic. However, researchers are often faced with the challenge of modelling the underlying climatic processes in order to be able to provide reliable weather forecasts.

Santorini is one of the best-studied volcanic archipelagos in the world. An international drilling expedition has now for the first time used a scientific drill ship to explore and investigate the seafloor around the Greek volcanic island. The researchers have uncovered evidence of an underwater eruption in 726 CE, previously known only from historical records.

Coastal seas form a complex transition zone between the two largest CO2 sinks in the global carbon cycle: land and ocean. Ocean researchers have now succeeded for the first time in investigating the role of the coastal ocean in a seamless model representation. The team led by Dr. Moritz Mathis from the Cluster of Excellence for Climate Research CLICCS at Universität Hamburg and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon was able to show: The intensity of CO2 uptake is higher in coastal seas than in the open ocean.

Research team analyses organic material from the early Earth tracing its origin and composition To learn about the first organisms on our planet, researchers have to analyse the rocks of the early Earth. These can only be found in a few places on the surface of the Earth. The Pilbara Craton in Western Australia is one of these rare sites: there are rocks there that are around 3.5 billion years old containing traces of the microorganisms that lived at that time.

Research team discovers complex microbial communities in ecosystems over 3 billion years ago Microorganisms were the first forms of life on our planet. The clues are written in 3.5 billion-year-old rocks by geochemical and morphological traces, such as chemical compounds or structures that these organisms left behind.

Research team studies interaction of dust with boulders and discovers potentially anomalous rocks Our Earth's Moon is almost completely covered in dust. Unlike on Earth, this dust is not smoothed by wind and weather, but is sharp-edged and also electrostatically charged. This dust has been studied since the Apollo era at the end of the 1960s.

Microplastic fibers are settling substantially slower than spherical particles in the atmosphere How far microplastics travel in the atmosphere depends crucially on particle shape, according to a recent study by scientists at the University of Vienna and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation in Göttingen: While spherical particles settle quickly, microplastic fibers stay in th eatmosphere much longer.

International research team measures isotopic composition of lunar rocks Their high Ti contents are ultimately believed to be derived from a distinct mineralogical layer formed as part of the unstable crystal pile that constituted the lunar interior following solidification of a magma ocean, shortly after Moon formation.

Geophysicists from Freie Universität Berlin among the researchers investigating human-induced earthquakes. It is common knowledge that humans have a big effect on the world and their natural environment. However, what may be less well-known is that humans can also induce earthquakes. Industrial activities such as geothermal energy production, fracking for oil and natural gas, and wastewater disposal can all lead to increased seismic activity that commonly takes the form of earthquakes.