The working group Marine Climate Research welcomes Dr. Xu Xu, who joined as a postdoc the working group "Paleoclimate Modeling" (Prof.Birgit Schneider) on March 1st.

She will work on the project "Simulating tropical marine climate-biogeochemical interactions from the Holocene into the Anthropocene". She previously worked at the Alfred Wegener Institute.

During the last three and half years, she simulated the oceanic and foraminiferal oxygen isotope variations at the present day and the Last Glacial Maximum. She gained her PhD from Bremen University.

15-02-2013: New publication: Peak glacial ¹⁴C ventilation ages suggest major draw-down of carbon into the abyssal ocean

Michael Sarnthein, Birgit Schneider and P. M. Grootes present in a publication in Climate of the Past Discussions (CPD) a new ocean-wide ¹⁴C dataset showing that during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and Heinrich Stadial 1 (HS-1) the ¹⁴C age difference between ocean deep waters and the atmosphere exceeded the modern values by up to 1500 ¹⁴C yr. From the extrapolation of the modern relationship between dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) and ¹⁴C, they infer that the deep ocean was indeed able to accomodate an additional amount of 730-980 GtC during glacial times, which contributes to a long lasting scientific debate.

To read the full article at Climate of the Past Discussions, please go here.