Professor Dr. M. Sarnthein D-24098 Kiel, 10 August 1999
Coordinator of the German IMAGES Group
Institut für Geowissenschaften, Universität Kiel

Report on German IMAGES Acticities 1998/1999

· The German consortium for participation in IMAGES expeditions and subsequent analyses of marine time series of climate variability consists of
- the Alfred-Wegener Insitute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI),
- the Geosciences Department of Bremen University (GeoB),
- the Geomar Research Center Kiel (Geomar),
- the Institute for Geosciences of Kiel University (IfG), and
- the Institute for Baltic Sea Research (IOW). Additional interests are located at - the Tuebingen University.
This consortium is coordinated by M. Sarnthein, IfG, and R. Schneider, GeoB.

14 members of these institutions have joined a national IMAGES meeting at May 10, 1999, in Hamburg, together with Dr. Maronde, the secretary of the department of Earth Science funding in the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; the German Science Foundation), to discuss present and future German coring interests and a better coordination of their funding, the flow of informations, and the data management. The German group welcomes the IMAGES secretariat moving to Kiel at the end of 1999 for the next three years.

· Over the last year, the German coring interests were focussed in the context of IMAGES cruise V on the Caribbean Sea (Geomar) , the Icelandic Sea (IfG; Geomar), and the continental margin off southern Portugal (Geomar). Funds for partial funding of the IMAGES-V cruise were successfully raised from the DFG. Future coring interests lie:
- along the Pakistani and Somalia continental margins (IOW),
- in the East Pacific off Peru and Chile (GeoB),
- in the NW Pacific in the context of the WEPAMA project (IfG and Geomar),
- along with a Transarctic Drilling project (AWI, Geomar), and
- various other 'pick-up" sites along transit lines of the Marion Dufresne.

· To facilitate the future financing of IMAGES cruises the German IMAGES community is suggesting to investigate strategies to raise EU fundings.

· To further improve on the future IMAGES data management, the data bank system PANGAEA (operated by AWI and the Center of Environmental Sciences, MARUM in Bremen) had a number of extensive discussions with S. deRijk, the IMAGES data manager, with the target to install PANGAEA as a relational data bank for the IMAGES program, aside with the NOAA NGDC Paleoclimate Data Archive in Boulder, CO, as will be proposed at the upcoming SCICOM Mtg. in Brest, September 7-8.

· IMAGES related conference activities and working groups: 1st EPILOG Conference at the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst near Bremen (R. Schneider, A. Mix, E.Bard); proposed IMAGES-SCOR Working Group on "Terminal Millennial Synthesis of Decadal-to-Millennial Scale Climate Climate Records of the Last 80 ky" (Sarnthein, Kennett).

M. Sarnthein