An abundance of information can be recovered from sediments of marine climate archives regarding climate changes of the past. Even though encrypted, this information is present as geochemical, sedimentological and physical measuring units (“proxies”). We manage several laboratories in which we extract this kind of data.

We conduct marine expeditions in order to locate and sample certain sediment archives of the ocean floor. These archives are formed variably in regard to the sediment composition and –structure, their origin and transport mechanisms, deposition settings, sedimentation rates and time intervals.

In order to locate and sample these achieves, we utilize a combination of different technologies: sediment echosounder, multicorer, box corer, gravity corer, kasten corer and piston corer. This equipment can also be borrowed with some restrictions.

The section Marine Geology curates and archives sediment cores from both polar oceans which were taken by RV Polarstern since 1983. The collection comprises more than 4000 cores from gravity, piston, kastenlot and giant box corers with a total length of more 12000 m as well as samples from multi corers.

We develop the Ocean Data View (ODV) software for the analysis and visualization of marine and other environmental data. Many important oceanographic and atmospheric datasets are provided for download as ODV collections. We also produce electronic atlases containing the original digital datasets as well as large visual galleries with many 2D sections along ship tracks as well as basin-wide spinning 3D scenes.

New: webODV, the online version of the ODV software provides efficient online analysis, visualization and extraktion of different datasets directly in the Browser at https://webodv.awi.de.