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.