Ein Blog über Forschung im MINT-Bereich

Category: Climate Science

Rainforest in Antarctica?

Let’s talk about deep time!

by Hanna Knahl

Figure 1 – This is how Antarctica might have looked like 90 Million years ago. Source: Alfred-Wegener-Institut / James McKay

“Rainforest in Antarctica” sounds like an April fool? Or like a climate apocalypse scenario for the future? It actually was real. Let’s go deep back in time to the fascinating epoch of the dinosaurs!

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Solving food challenges on Earth by using technologies for human space exploration

by Alwyn Saju

Figure 1: Patiently waiting for food aid in Bamako, Mali, photo: Derek Markwell/DFID.

Long wait for food, shortage of fresh food and water scarcity. These are some of the common problems faced by the displaced people living in refugee camps. Same is the case in relief camps set in places hit by natural calamities like flood, earthquake, drought etc. The previous article was about “Controlled Environment Agriculture”. In this article, you will read about an interesting project called “MEPA” which intends to solve food challenges on earth, especially in refugee camps using CEA technologies.

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Kiruna – All Fired up for an Icy Adventure

by Christoph Kulmann and Greta Sondej

Fig. 1: With a bit of luck, you can see northern lights (Aurora borealis) in the night sky during the training week. Copyright © WikiImages 2012 / Pixabay

Long anticipated and eagerly awaited, our student training week starts in snowy Lapland near Sweden’s northernmost city: Kiruna (from the North Sami “giron”, meaning “snow grouse”).

Bremen Airport is already getting us in the mood for the weather that awaits us in Lapland… 

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REXUS/BEXUS – Experiments Soar Into Space!

An European Education Programme Empowers Students to Develop Their own Space Mission

by Greta Sondej and Christoph Kulmann

Fig. 1: Have you always wanted to send an experiment into space? In this case, the German-Swedish student programme REXUS/BEXUS is the right choice for you. Copyright © Arek Socha 2016 / Pixabay

In our last article, we told you about our FORAREX project, which we developed within the framework of the German-Swedish REXUS/BEXUS programme. 

But what exactly does this REXUS/BEXUS programme entail? And who can participate? 

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Steps Back into the Past of the Ice Cores and the Planet

About Ice Cores Part III

by Hanna Sophie Knahl

Ice cores preserve stories of the past. Now we want to compare these stories  with other history books. Illustration: Hanna Knahl

We have now already learned a lot about ice cores. We know where to find them, how to drill them and how to extract information about the past climate from them. BUT there is still one important piece of information missing. The time stamp. How do we determine how far back in time the ice we hold with our gloved hands comes from? We will see, the ice also uses special languages to encode this secret.

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The Studies of the Historical Books Made of Ice

About Ice Cores Part II

by Hanna Sophie Knahl

Cross-section of an ice core. Photo: Sepp Kipfstuhl

In the first article about ice cores, we learned why ancient stories lie dormant in the ice. We got to the icy library and looked at how the stories can be recovered in the form of ice cores. This article will deal with the question how we can reveal the stories of the ice cores. To do this, we need to understand the different languages of the ice.

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The Story of Giant Libraries Made of Ice

About Ice Cores Part I

by Hanna Sophie Knahl

A transforming icy library slowly descending towards the valley. Glacier in the northeast of Greenland. Photo: Jan Rohde

On earth there is a lot of ice and snow and not only in winter – at least at the moment. At the poles there are huge sheets of ice and in between exist many smaller and larger glaciers on high mountains. Stories are preserved in the ice. Stories from long ago. How this happened and how these stories can be brought to the surface, we will learn in this article.

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