Central Europe

Fewer than one hundred kilometers lie between the flood-ravaged district of Ahrweiler and the volcanic lakes in the Eifel. These maars have now provided evidence that weather extremes could increase. Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry have used sediment cores from maar lakes and dry maars in the volcanic Eifel to precisely construe how the climate in Central Europe changed over the last 60,000 years. In cold periods, the climate fluctuated less, and weather extremes were less pronounced. In warm periods, on the other hand, there were more extreme precipitation events, and abundant decadal fluctuations. This result suggests that Central Europe will have to adapt to more extreme weather events as a result of human-induced climate change.

The eruption of the Laacher See volcano in the Eifel, a low mountain range in western Germany, is one of Central Europe's largest eruptions over the past 100,000 years. The eruption ejected around 20 cubic kilometers of tephra and the eruption column is believed to have reached at least 20 kilometers in height, comparable to the Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1991. Technical advances in combination with tree remains buried in the course of the eruption now enabled an international research team to accurately date the event. Accordingly, the eruption of the Laacher See volcano occurred 13,077 years ago and thus 126 years earlier than previously assumed. This sheds new light on the climate history of the entire North Atlantic and European region and requires an adaptation of the European climate archives. "We can now precisely date a drop in temperature at the end of the last glacial period, so that the information coincides with that observed from the Greenland Ice Sheet cores," said Dr. Frederick Reinig, a dendrochronologist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz (JGU). An international research team with experts in archeology, climatology, ecology, radiocarbon dating, and volcanology was involved in this study. The research results were published in the journal Nature.

The smoke from the extreme forest fires on the US West Coast in September 2020 traveled over many thousands of kilometers to Central Europe, where it continued to affect the atmosphere for days afterwards. A comparison of ground and satellite measurements now shows: The forest fire aerosol disturbed the free troposphere over Leipzig in Germany as never before. An evaluation by an international research team led by the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) revealed an extraordinary optical thickness on 11 September 2020, which attenuated sunlight by a third. The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, is the first publication to show that ESA's novel Aeolus satellite can not only reliably measure global wind profiles but also aerosols in the atmosphere as it was shown by comparing Aeolus measurements with lidar measurements from the ground. The Center National de Recherches Météorologiques (CNRM) of the University of Toulouse, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the European Space Agency (ESA) were involved in the study.

rchaeologists working in the district of Tübingen in southwest Germany have discovered the region's earliest gold object to date. It is a spiral ring of gold wire unearthed in autumn 2020 from the grave of an Early Bronze Age woman. It is about 3,800 years old, according to analyses. Precious metal finds from this period are very rare in southwestern Germany. The gold probably originates from Cornwall in southwest Britain. The archaeologists say it is unusually early proof of the far-reaching trade in luxury objects of the people of that time. The excavation was led by Professor Raiko Krauss from the Institute of Prehistory and Medieval Archaeology at the University of Tübingen and Dr. Jörg Bofinger from the Baden-Württemberg State Office for Cultural Heritage Management, based in Esslingen.

/PRNewswire/ -- Increased demand for hardwood fiber in key pulp-producing countries and a weaker US dollar resulted in higher hardwood pulplogs prices in the...