Bremen International Graduate School for Marine Sciences

The EGU General Assembly 2012 in Vienna was attended by more than 11000 participants, therefore it is the largest European conference for Geoscientists this year. I had the chance to present my PhD project for the first time on an international stage with a poster titled “Export of Labrador Sea Water through Flemish Pass” in the session “The North Atlantic: natural variability and global change”. This was the largest ocean related session of the conference with the highest number of submitted abstracts. In the early stage of my PhD, the various talks in this session provided a deeper insight regarding the ‘state of the art’ scientific status of the North Atlantic which is very helpful to familiarize with my topic and to understand it in a broader context. During the poster presentation I had the opportunity to meet several experts in the field as well as other young scientists and to discuss my plans for my PhD project with them. I could also deepen the contact to our Canadian cooperation as a Scientist working in the Canadian Atlantic Zone Monitoring Program (AZMP) visited my poster. In the AZMP project, ship sections in the Flemish Pass are carried out three times annually and historic data exist since 1999. This additional data set is a great benefit for my project.

Several other sessions also yielded interesting new aspects for my work. In the “Ocean Remote Sensing Session” I gained a very valuable insight in new tools which I could potentially use at a later stage of my PhD work to identify oceanic fronts. In other sessions like the “Open Session on Ocean Circulation” and the “Southern Ocean and its Role in the Global Climate System” I could broaden my oceanographic knowledge and get an overview about the ongoing research in other areas.

I want to thank GLOMAR for the funding, which gave me the chance to participate in this interesting conference, to network and to make the first step to establish myself in the scientific community.