Along the middle Atbara River, Pleistocene alluvial sediments dated to ~200 to 20 ka are exposed in eastern Sudan over a length of about 200 km with a maximum thickness of 50 m. The Atbara River today has its headwaters in the northern Ethiopian Plateau and is the last major tributary of the Nile before it flows through the Sahara. Previous studies and our fieldwork since 2018 have resulted in extensive finds of fossil terrestrial...

Polar plankton plays a large role in global carbon cycling. There is a significant lack of knowledge of these biotas, however. The main goal of our project is to understand how plankton and oceans interacted in the past during the Eocene/Oligocene (E/O) transition, when significant climate shifts happened. We use a multiproxy approach by combining microfossils and geochemical data. Our study includes the first-ever comprehensive surveys of both diatom and radiolarian plankton diversity (siliceous protists...

Geo.X is the research network for geosciences in the Berlin and Potsdam metropolitan region and integrates five universities and six extramural research institutions. Our partners are committed to a FAIR and sustainable handling of research data and infrastructures. For this purpose, we established a search portal for the geoscientific laboratory infrastructure and related research data of the network partners (LI@Geo.X). The portal aims to increase the visibility and accessibility of the partner institutions’ infrastructures, data,...

Geosciences only play a minor role in today’s German and Austrian school curricula, although being strongly related to important topics such as climate change and sustainability of resources. The Mineralogical Science Kit (Mineralogischer Lehrkoffer ‘mileko’) aims at bringing back geoscientific and mineralogical contents into STEAM-fields (science, technology, engineering, art, mathematics) by linking mineralogy to regular teaching subjects. In 5 different modules pupils can not only discover the world of rocks and minerals but also get...

Geological evidence and geodynamic modelling suggest that the Nile river system has been largely stable since its origins ~30 Ma. The Nile could have provided a long-term migration route for vertebrates including hominins between Eastern and Northern Africa. However, other geological data contradict such an old stabilisation of the course of the Nile. Fieldwork along the middle stretches of the Atbara River, the last tributary to the Nile before it crosses the Sahara, provides evidence...