Doctoral researchers Katharina Seeger of the University of Cologne and Taina Marcos Lima Pinho of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven are to be awarded this year’s Bernd Rendel Prize by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) in recognition of their promising and original pre-doctoral research in the geosciences. They were selected by a jury made up of members of the DFG’s review boards in the geosciences.
The prizewinners will each receive €3,000 from the Bernd Rendel Foundation, which is administered by Stifterverband. The prize money is intended to enable them to pursue academic activities such as attending international conferences and meetings. The prize will be presented at the annual meeting of the German Geological Society – Geological Association (DGGV), which is to take place in Göttingen from 14 to 18 September.
Katharina Seeger’s research focuses on low-lying coastal areas such as river deltas and coastal plains, and their vulnerability to sea-level rise and flooding from storm surges, tsunamis and river floods. Many coastal regions such as densely populated deltas are subsiding as a result of both natural processes and human activity, making them especially susceptible. Seeger is particularly concerned with regions where little or no local data is currently available or accessible. For this reason, her work relies heavily on freely available satellite-based remote sensing data. She develops methods for processing and combining this data to generate reliable information on flood risk. In the course of her doctoral research, Seeger has specialised in assessing land elevation relative to local sea level. She investigates how satellite-derived elevation models need to be integrated with sea-level data in order to ensure and improve the quality of flood hazard assessments. Seeger’s work spans local, regional and global scales, and she is involved in numerous research projects around the world, including on the Ayeyarwady Delta in Myanmar, the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and the Gulf of Guinea – all regions for which data remains scarce.
Taina Marcos Lima Pinho’s main research area is the palaeoceanography and palaeoclimatology of the tropical and subtropical Atlantic during the Late Quaternary – the geological period spanning the last 2.6 million years up to the present day. His goal is to decipher the complex interrelationship between the Southern Ocean and Antarctic ice dynamics. Since the feedback mechanisms between ice and ocean that govern the behaviour of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet are still not well understood, it remains impossible to make reliable predictions about future sea-level rise. Some studies have found that even a warming of just 2 to 3 degrees Celsius could trigger a partial collapse of the ice sheet – a phenomenon that has occurred during past warm periods in Earth’s climate history. Given the pivotal role the Southern Ocean plays in connecting the world’s ocean basins, such an event would have global consequences. In his doctoral research, Taina Pinho is working with high-resolution records derived from preserved biogenic carbonates from Antarctica, particularly from the glacial periods. His investigations have already identified key mechanisms such as shifts in water mass composition and changes in meridional circulation – processes that are directly linked to his current research on Antarctic palaeoceanography. He is currently studying deglacial meltwater discharge from the East Antarctica.
The DFG has awarded the Bernd Rendel Prize every year since 2002 to graduates in the geosciences who have not yet completed their doctorate with the aim of enabling them to pursue academic activities. Bernd Rendel was a geology student who died at a young age; the foundation named after him was established in his memory by his family.
For further information about the Bernd Rendel Prize and previous prizewinners, see:
www.dfg.de/rendel_prize