The discovery of the church of Rungholt, a landmark for the drowned medieval landscapes of the Wadden Sea World Heritage.

The UNESCO World Heritage Wadden Sea holds remains of a medieval cultural landscape shaped by interactions between man and natural forces. From the Netherlands to Denmark, human efforts of cultivating low-lying areas created a unique coastal landscape. Since the Middle Ages, storm floods widely drowned embanked cultural land and especially affected North Frisia (Germany), where once fertile marshland was permanently turned into tidal flats.

A submerged Stone Age hunting architecture from the Western Baltic Sea.

The Baltic Sea basins, some of which only submerged in the mid-Holocene, preserve Stone Age structures that did not survive on land. Yet, the discovery of these features is challenging and requires cross-disciplinary approaches between archeology and marine geosciences. Here, we combine shipborne and autonomousunderwater vehicle hydroacoustic data with up to a centimeter range resolution, sedimentological samples, and optical images to explore a Stone Age megastructure located in 21 m water depth in the Bay of Mecklenburg, Germany.

Lost in the North Sea-Geophysical and geoarchaeological prospection of the Rungholt medieval dyke system (North Frisia, Germany).

We performed geophysical and geoarchaeological investigations in the Wadden Sea off North Frisia (Schleswig-Holstein, Germany) to map the remains and to determine the state of preservation of the medieval settlement of Rungholt, especially its southern dyke segment, called the Niedam dyke. Based on archaeological finds and historical maps, Rungholt is assumed to be located in the wadden sea area around the island Hallig Südfall. During medieval and early modern times, extreme storm events caused major land losses, turning cultivated marshland into tidal flats.

A new approach to the temporal significance of house orientations in European Early Neolithic settlements.

This paper shows that local differences in house orientation in settlements from the Early Neolithic in Central Europe reflect a regular chronological trajectory based on Bayesian calibration of 14C-series. This can be used to extrapolate the dating of large-scale settlement plans derived from, among other methods, geophysical surveys. In the southwest Slovakian settlement of Vráble, we observed a progressive counter-clockwise rotation in house orientation from roughly 32° to 4° over a 300 year period.

Geophysical assessments of renewable gas energy compressed in geologic pore storage reservoirs.

Renewable energy resources can indisputably minimize the threat of global warming and climate change. However, they are intermittent and need buffer storage to bridge the time-gap between production (off peak) and demand peaks. Based on geologic and geochemical reasons, the North German Basin has a very large capacity for compressed air/gas energy storage CAES in porous saltwater aquifers and salt cavities.