Plattform Platform	Reise-Nr. Cruise-No.	Zeitraum Period	Projekt Project	Arbeitsgebiet Working area
Meteor	M144-1	27.12.2017 - 18.01.2018		Mediterranean Sea

Fahrtleiter Chief Scientist	Institut Institute	Auslaufhafen Port of departure	Einlaufhafen Port of return	Stationskarte Station map	Schiffsroute Trackchart
Pross Jorg	Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat Heidelberg	Heraklion	Catania

Ziel der Reise / Objectives of Cruise:

In light of anthropogenic climate change and its effects on future societies, the question to what extent short-term climate forcing has influenced past sociocultural evolution has increasingly shifted into the focus of both scientific and public interest. The Aegean region is uniquely suited to investigate linkages between climatic forcing and potential sociocultural response; it represents not only a cradle of modern civilization and has yielded a unique record of prehistoric to historic cultures, but also exhibits extreme sensitivity to abrupt climatic and environmental change throughout the Holocene (i.e., the past 11.700 years). In the Aegean region, however, clarification of causal links between climate and ecosystem change on the one hand and sociocultural evolution on the other hand has yet been hindered by the scarcity of sufficiently long, temporally highly resolved, and precisely dated region-specific 'master records' of climatic and environmental change that can be aligned with the archeological record. The planned expedition with the research vessel METEOR to be undertaken by an international team of geoscientists and archeologists from Germany, Greece, Italy, and the United States will circumvent existing limitations via the novel approach of analyzing marine sediment cores from coastal settings off archeological sites for their terrestrial and marine environmental signals. Via the generation of state-of-the-art geochemical (e.g., element geochemistry, stable and radiogenic isotopes, biomarkers) and biotic (e.g., pollen, fish teeth, calcareous nannoplankton, foraminifera) proxy data, the cores will yield regionally differentiated reconstructions of terrestrial and marine environmental change in the Aegean region throughout the Holocene in unprecedented detail. Integration of these data with the region's unique archeological record will allow detailed assessment of how climatic and environmental change interacted with socioeconomic evolution and human resource demands. The work areas for the proposed R/V METEOR expedition have been selected such that they fully meet the scientific requirements of (i) yielding records with exceptionally high sedimentation rates for the Holocene (i.e., the past 11,700 years) in close proximity to prominent archeological sites; this necessitates operations in coastal and near-coastal waters. (ii) yielding records with lower sedimentation rates, but of longer duration (i.e., approximately 25,000 years) in order to record the full range of climatic and environmental background conditions realized in the Aegean region; this necessitates operations in open, offshore waters. Data collected via: CTD, gravity corer, kasten corer, multicorer, multi-closure net, parasound

Messungen / Measurements