CLIMATE AND EARTH
SYSTEM SCIENCES
Photo: UHH/Denstorf
28 April 2021
Photo: private
We are proud to announce the successful disputation of our SICSS member Dorothea Bunzel.
Her dissertation "North Sea salt marshes and their response to changing storm-climate conditions over the last century" was supervised by Prof. Dr. Gerhard Schmiedl and Prof. Dr. Christian Betzler.
Dorothea’s doctoral thesis was part of the so-called SEASTORM project ("Unravelling the signals of sea level and storminess of the past millennium, southern North Sea"), which was conducted as part of the SPP-1889 special priority programme "SeaLevel: Regional sea-level change and society" under the umbrella of the DFG. In her doctoral thesis, Dorothea investigated the impacts of storm surges on sedimentation processes in the active foreland salt marshes of the south-eastern North Sea area over the last century. The study was motivated by the important ecosystem services that salt marshes provide in the transition area between land and sea: they attenuate wave energy and thus form a natural protection against storm surges. It is unclear, however, whether the human-modified salt marshes that we find along the German North Sea coast can withstand accelerated sea level rise and accompanied effects through storm surges in the near future. The data collected by Dorothea form an important basis for a better understanding of the sedimentation and ecosystem dynamics of human-modified salt marshes and provide an assessment of their stress level in response to changing environmental conditions over the 20th century.
Dorothea was a member of the Institute for Geology at the Universität Hamburg
Dorothea's future plans?
Dorothea wants to stay in science. For upcoming projects, however, Dorothea would like to focus on the investigation of modern benthic foraminifera from the Indian Ocean with regard to the stable isotope and trace-element composition of foraminiferal calcite. By gaining an overview of the climatic and oceanographic processes within the Indian Ocean, which is one of the most oxygen deprived oceans today, Dorothea wants to contribute to a better understanding of past and present, natural and anthropogenic changes in the ocean’s oxygen inventory.