SoSe 2025
April 16, 2025
No speaker scheduled.April 23, 2025
No speaker scheduled.April 30, 2025
No speaker scheduled.May 7, 2025 - Dr. Max Dröllner
University of Göttingen, Dept. of Sedimentology and Environmental Geology
Title to be announced
May 14, 2025
No speaker scheduled.May 21, 2025
No speaker scheduled.May 28, 2025
No speaker scheduled.June 4, 2025
No speaker scheduled.June 11, 2025 - Prof. Dr. Eberhard Gischler
Goethe University Frankfurt
A 5700-year storm and climate archive at annual resolution: the sunken cave of the Blue Hole in Belize
Predicting the frequency of tropical cyclones is hampered by insufficient knowledge of their natural variability in the past. A 30-meter-long sediment core from the Great Blue Hole, a flooded karst cave off the coast of Belize, provides the longest available continuous and annually resolved archive of storm frequency. This dataset extends our understanding from the instrumental record (73 years), historical documentation (173 years) and paleotempestological record (2000 years) to the last 5700 years. A total of 694 event layers were identified. They show a clear regional trend of increasing storm activity in the southwestern Caribbean following an orbitally induced shift of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. The superimposed short-term variations match Holocene climate intervals and are caused by solar radiation-driven sea surface temperature anomalies. An extrapolation for the 21st century indicates an unprecedented increase in storm frequency due to Industrial-Age warming.