Johann P. Klages
Johann P. Klages is a marine geologist working in the "Marine Geology" section of the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven since 2011. He is primarily concerned with ice sheet and climate reconstructions of the Antarctic continent from Cretaceous to Quaternary periods for better categorizing today's changes and make simulations of future ice sheet development more reliable. He teaches clastic sedimentology at the University of Bremen (Germany) and introduces students to geoscientific field methods on polar expeditions. He studied at the German Universities of Würzburg and Kiel (2004-2011) followed by doctoral studies at the University of Bremen (2011-2014), combined with extended research stays at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge (UK)."
Evolution of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from green- to icehouse conditions – Exploiting unique data for advancing numerical model simulations
Most ice sheet models indicate that the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) will lose considerable amounts of ice over the coming decades and centuries. This mass loss will mainly be caused by warm deep waters increasingly reaching the AIS’ margins and, with many upstream parts of ice-sheet sectors being grounded far below modern sea level, this will lead to accelerating and irreversible retreat. Are we therefore currently witnessing the initiation of runaway retreat of large ice-sheet portions that will result in rapid sea level rise and enhanced global climatic disruption? Finding more reliable answers to this question requires robust multi-proxy data analyses from AIS-proximal sediment records spanning times of fundamental climatic and cryospheric change. Such records, however, are rare and challenging to obtain, requiring AIS-proximal marine-geological field campaigns that are only feasible within multinational consortiums. Numerous seafloor coring and drilling missions over recent decades set out to continental shelves around Antarctica to unearth geological remains of past ice sheet change as well as yet hidden pre-Quaternary Antarctic worlds that were warmer and CO2-richer than present. We exploited these multi-proxy datasets to test and validate novel coupled modeling techniques. Our approach of combining data and models revealed unprecedented insights into key periods of Antarctica’s long-term paleoenvironmental evolution, and will eventually help facilitating better predictions of Antarctica’s response to climatic conditions anticipated within the next two centuries.
