By Hanna Knahl
Figure 1 – This is an artistic way of showing Antarctica’s transition from a warm climate with forest to a colder climate with rising ice 34 million years ago. Source: Created with AI Image Generator
Let’s travel back in time again, dig deep into the sediments and see what face Antarctica wants to show us this time! Is it hot and colourful or cool and icy? Or is it both? My “time machine” will bring us back into a climate full of change and mysteries.
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!
by Ronja Gronemeyer
Merge or die – The fate of clouds and (covid restricted) cocktail parties
How the fate of simulated rain cells improves understanding of tropical storms. Stay tuned, as we learn about rain tracking algorithms and analyze the merging or decaying of competing clouds. Finally, we will see why cold pools affect cloud clustering similarly, as covid restrictions affect a cocktail party…
by Ronja Gronemeyer
Clouds can party hard!
Clouds like to cuddle and cluster. Cloud clustering is crucial to understanding the formation of tropical storms. This article will brush up your basics on convection, introduce you to fascinating atmospheric phenomena and reveal, how the clustering of clouds can be compared to a cocktail party…
by Greta Sondej and Christoph Kulmann
Fig. 1: The REXUS 25 sounding rocket on its way to the stars. Copyright © FORAREX 2019
“There is no comfortable path that leads from the earth to the stars”, this was already known by the Roman philosopher and naturalist Lucius Annaeus Seneca (ca. 4 BC – 65 AD), also known as Seneca the Younger.
For our journey to the stars, we have been working towards this event for almost two years with our FORAREX project: The Launch Campaign at the European Space and Sounding Rocket Range (Esrange) at the civilian balloon and rocket launch site near Kiruna in northern Sweden. It is the highlight of the German-Swedish student programme REXUS/BEXUS, which we have already presented here on the Science Blog.
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…
by Team FORAREX
Fig. 1: Maximum relaxation – lounging on the seabed and swaying to the rhythm of the waves. Copyright © StockSnap 2017 / Pixabay
Imagine you are living under the sea. You see the suns rays shining through the water. There is sand beneath you. The water flows around you to the rhythm of the wave – and you sway with it (see Fig. 1). Everything feels very pleasant. You are thinking how wonderful your home is. The waves, the light – everything is perfect.
But suddenly a dark shadow looms over you – and this shadow takes you out of this paradise and catapults you into space! Isn’t that a disturbing and rather improbable idea?
But that is in fact my story.
by Christoph Kulmann and Greta Sondej
Fig.1: Left: Close-up of a foraminifera with pseudopodia; right: Four foraminifera in direct size comparison with a pinhead. Copyright © FORAREX 2018
Foraminifera (Latin for “hole bearers”, informally called “forams”) are single-celled organisms that usually have a multi-chambered shell, which can be built in various ways depending on the species. They are the stars of the FORAREX (FORAminifera Rocket EXperiment) project, in which we investigate their behaviour and shell growth under microgravitational conditions.
About Ice Cores Part III
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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