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ECORD Summer School 2007

"Paleoceanography"

13 - 24 August 2007

at the MARUM - Center for Marine Environmental Sciences and
the IODP Bremen Core Repository, University of Bremen, Germany

1 The Aim

The major goal was to bring PhD students and young Postdocs in touch with IODP at an early stage of their career, inform them about the actual research within this international scientific program, and to prepare them for future participations in IODP expeditions. Such training will be achieved by taking the summer school participants on a “virtual ship” where they get familiarized with a wide spectrum of state-of-the-art analytical technologies and core description methods according to the high standards on IODP expeditions. Therefore the course was equally balanced, with half the time dedicated to lectures and discussions and the other half to laboratory exercises.

MARUM - Center for Marine Environmental Sciences

2 Location and Organisation

The ECORD Summer School on Paleoceanography 2007 was held from 13 – 24 August 2007 at the MARUM_Research Center Ocean Margins (RCOM), Bremen University, Germany. It has been organized by Prof. Gerold Wefer, Director of the Research MARUM_Research Center Ocean Margins and Prof. Dierk Hebbeln, Director of the Bremen International Graduate School for Marine Sciences „Global Change in the Marine Realm“ (GLOMAR).
Besides MARUM_RCOM and GLOMAR, the MARUM-building also hosts the IODP Bremen Core Repository (BCR), which offeres unique training possibilities. For lectures and exercises the MARUM provided a seminar room equipped with 20 laptops (internet access, MatLab etc.).

Located on the university campus, MARUM hosts the IODP Bremen Core Repository (BCR), the only IODP core repository in Europe.

3 Programme

The two-week course combined lectures and interactive discussions on the paleoceanography of the Cretaceous to Cenozoic oceans with practical exercises, as well as core-logging practice with the application of time-series analysis techniques, using the facilities of the IODP Bremen Core Repository (BCR). The scientific lectures and exercises have be confined mostly to the first week, whereas the “virtual ship” related practicals took part during the second week. During the weekend in the middle of the summer school an excursion was offered.

In the first week the program (see attachment) focused on lectures by and discussions with leading researchers on key topics related to, e.g., ocean heat transport, nutrient cycles, rapid climate change and recent developments in integrated stratigraphy. In addition to the lecture program the IODP Topical Symposium on “North Atlantic and Arctic Climate Variability” was held at the MARUM institute during the first week of the ECORD Summer School. This provided the PhD students and young PostDocs with first-hand exposure to current research results from the world’s leading scientists, and the chance to discuss their work directly with the experts. Several of the summer school participants used the possibility to present posters about their own projects to an international community. The integration of the Topical Symposium with the ECORD Summer School also allowed that speakers of the Topical Symposium contributed with lectures to the summer school program.

The weekend between the first and the second week gave the participants the possibility to explore the city of Bremen at the free Saturday. On Sunday the whole group visited the ice-core repository at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven and joined an introductory lecture on ice-core research.

The second week of the Summer School took advantage of the unique facilities of the Bremen IODP core repository and labs and aimed at introducing PhD students and young PostDocs to a full range of IODP related topics from general introduction to the program to compiling of IODP proposals and to get an insight into “shipboard” methodologies applied on the drilling vessels. The focus was on group-based practicals applying logging instruments, such as Multisensor Core Logger (MSCL), XRF Scanners, Linescan Imaging, and Color Scanner.

Within the second week of the summer school, the participants were given the opportunity to present their own projects in 15-minute talks. Mrs Maite Hernandez Sanchez, University of Bristol and Mr Ulrich Kotthoff, University of Frankfurt, received awards for best oral presentations.

Lecturers

NameInstitute
Prof. Dr. Jim ChannellUniversity of Florida
Dr. Barbara DonnerUniversity of Bremen
Dr. Jochen ErbacherBundesanstalt für Geowissenschaften und Rohstoffe (BGR), Hannover
Dr. Jens GruetznerUniversity of Bremen
Dr. Sepp KipfstuhlUniversity of Kiel
Dr. Henning KuhnertUniversity of Bremen
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang KuhntUniversity of Kiel
Dr. Frank LamyAWI Bremerhaven
Hans Christian LarsenHokkaido University
Dr. Stefan MulitzaUniversity of Bremen
Heiko PälikeNational Oceanographic Centre, Southampton
Dr. André PaulUniversity of Bremen
Ursula RöhlUniversity of Bremen
Dr. Stephan SteinkeUniversity of Bremen
Prof. Dr. Debbie ThomasTexas A & M University
Prof. Dr. Ralf TiedemannAWI Bremerhaven
Dr. Rik TjalingiiUniversity of Kiel
Dr. Thomas WesterholdMARUM, Bremen

4 Participants

A total of 24 PhD students and young post-docs from several European countries, the US and China participated in the ECORD Summer School.
NameInstitute
Stijn De SchepperUniversity of Bremen
Feng DingUniversity of Bremen
Annika FörsterUniversity of Bremen
Matthias ForwickUniversity of Tromsø
Beatriz González MoraUniversity of Salamanca
Kristin GrasmoKristin Grasmo
Sandra HerrmannETH Zurich
Heidi KjennbakkenUniversity of Bergen
Ulrich KotthoffFrankfurt University
Stephanie KuschUniversity of Bremen
Jörg LippholdUniversität Heidelberg
Bob LyonsSyracuse University
Christian MärzAWI Bremerhaven
Diana MagensAWI Bremerhaven
Nikesh NarayanUniversity of Bremen
Nick OwenTrinity College Dublin
Daniel Rincon-MartinezAWI Bremerhaven
Maite SanchezUniversity of Bristol
Cornelia SaukelUniversity of Bremen
Thomas SchmidETH Zurich
Julio SepulvedaUniversity of Bremen
Joanne TudgeUniversity of Leicester
Henna ValppuUniversity of Oulu
Zhang XiaoyuZhejiang University

5 Outcome and Evaluation

Anonymous evaluation forms filled out by the participants revealed a very positive feedback. The statements demonstrate how useful the discussions with the leading experts for their ongoing projects have been and that a lot of problems or questions related to their projects have been solved and answered by the scientist involved in the summer school. In particular the participants highly appreciated the combination of the ECORD Summer School with the IODP Topical Symposium. Nevertheless the participants gave hints for improvements as well, e.g. the 15-minute talks by the participants about their own projects should take place in the first rather than in the second week of the summer school.
 

6 Outlook and ECORD Summer School 2008

The comprehensive approach of the ECORD Summer School on Paleoceanography 2007– combining scientific lectures with practicals on IODP-style “shipboard” measurements – will be the blueprint for a proposed series of summer schools to be held once per year within the ECORD summer school program at the MARUM in Bremen. It is planned to address the three major topics of the IODP Initial Science Plan in a recurring three year cycle, thereby exploiting the unique facilities in Bremen where about 50 scientists work on the whole width of IODP-related topics. Following an “Earth History” topic in 2007 (ECORD Summer School on Paleoceanography) ECORD has already agreed to provide funds for an “Deep Biosphere” topic in 2008: the ECORD Summer School on ”The Deep Subseafloor Biosphere”. The probable time frame is early September 2008.