- Cluster Ocean Floor
- Research Unit RECORDER
Research Unit RECORDER
Ocean-floor sediments record continuous information on environmental and climatic conditions in the Earth’s past and are the main means to reconstruct past states and processes on relevant time scales beyond instrumental records.
Our objective in RECORDER is to investigate Ocean-floor sediments as an archive if past climate to provide the time dimension for processes investigated in RECEIVER and REACTOR beyond the instrumental record. The research will provide test cases of Earth-system behavior during climate states significantly warmer than the present and under different climatic and geodynamic boundary conditions (e.g., different sea-level stands, warmer climates, plate-tectonic rates).
The aims of RECORDER make essential contributions to the Cluster’s overarching objectives, including 1) to derive scenarios for ›warmer worlds‹ through comprehensive decoding of environmental signals from past warm climate conditions as recorded in ocean-floor archives, 2) to quantify fluxes of carbon and other elements to and across the ocean floor and estimate their budgets under current and past states of the Earth system, and 3) to generate an in-depth understanding of how the structure and state of ocean-floor ecosystems are interrelated with local-scale biogeochemical processes and other environmental conditions.