Inlandeisdynamik und Klimaschwankungen während der Weichselvereisung im Bereich der südwestlichen Ostseeküste

• Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Manfred Anton Frechen; Professor Dr. Heiko Hüneke
• Fachliche Zuordnung: Paläontologie
• Förderung: Förderung von 2013 bis 2017
• Projektkennung: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 237165820

Ice sheets are important features in the Earth's climate system as they lock up large amounts of freshwater, respond to climate change and contribute to sea-level rise under conditions of atmospheric warming. The Scandinavian Ice Sheet that covered large parts of the Northern European Plain was a key feature throughout the Late Quaternary, and its many advance and retreat cycles have left ample evidence of an ice sheet that responded to climate change quite dynamically. Studies of past ice sheets and the sediments produced by them are crucial to improve our understanding of modern ice sheets because beds of modern ice sheets are inaccessible. Likewise, our understanding of the timing and hence palaeoclimatic significance of ice-sheet advances - and hence climate fluctuations which caused these - remains very incomplete. As a result, numerical models struggle to incorporate past ice-sheet fluctuations. The Baltic Sea coast, despite decades of geoscientific research, is still relatively poorly understood in terms of ice-sheet dynamics, and their relationship to retreat phases and interstadial/ interglacial is limited. We here propose to concentrate on the Isle of Rügen, NE Germany, to reconstruct the dynamics of successive advances of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet during the Weichselian using sedimentological analysis and to establish the timing of events by dating, using optically-stimulated luminescence methods. This approach, for the first time, would allow different units to be reliably correlated on Rügen and with other areas in the peri-Baltic region. These results would help to decipher the response of the dominant European ice sheet to past climate change and provide climate modellers with the necessary background data against which their models can be tuned.

• DFG-Verfahren: Sachbeihilfen
• Internationaler Bezug: Großbritannien
• Beteiligte Personen: Professor Dr. Reinhard Lampe; Dr. Sven Lukas; Professor Dr. Martin Meschede; Professorin Dr. Sumiko Tsukamoto