For the researchers, the German research vessel METEOR will be expedition laboratory and home at the same time.
How did environmental and climatic changes early on in human history influence cultures - and what conclusions can be drawn relative to climate change today? These questions are the subject of a three-week expedition aboard the research vessel METEOR that will take an international team of geoscientists and archaeologists, led by researchers from Heidelberg University, into the eastern Mediterranean. "The goal is to reconstruct the climate and ecosystem dynamics over the past 10,000 years there, for both the coastal countries and the marine area, and to place them in relationship to archaeological finds," explains expedition leader Jörg Pross of the Institute of Earth Sciences. Cooperation partners from Greece, Italy and the USA will be joining the voyage scheduled for the fall of 2017. "The history of the eastern Mediterranean region is marked by repeated socioeconomic and sociocultural upheaval. Although climate is suspected to lie at the root of some of this upheaval, we do not yet have climate data that we can connect to findings from archaeological research that would explain any possible relationships," explains Pross. To reconstruct the changes on both land and sea, the researchers will extract core samples from the sea floor near the coast. The drill cores hold various climatic and environmental indicators, such as pollen from land plants that end up deposited on the sea floor.
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