“Baltic Earth Conference” for the Baltic Sea

On the Pol­ish penin­su­la Hel oppo­site the met­ro­pol­i­tan region of Gdan­sk in the vil­lage of Jas­tar­nia, the fourth Baltic Earth Con­fer­ence will take place from May 30 to June 3. It is orga­nized by the inter­na­tion­al Baltic Earth Sec­re­tari­at at the Helmholtz Cen­ter Here­on in coop­er­a­tion with the Leib­niz Insti­tute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW) and the Insti­tute of Oceanol­o­gy of the Pol­ish Acad­e­my of Sci­ences (IO-PAN), Sopot.

A total of about 130 par­tic­i­pants from the Baltic Sea region and oth­er parts of the world are expect­ed to spend a week exchang­ing their sci­en­tif­ic results and expe­ri­ences. The com­mon thread of the con­fer­ence will be the so-called BEAR reports (Baltic Earth Assess­ment Reports). These are sci­en­tif­ic sum­maries of cur­rent knowl­edge on spe­cif­ic the­mat­ic com­plex­es con­cern­ing the Earth sys­tem of the Baltic Sea region.

Rich variety of topics

The reports cov­er marine, mete­o­ro­log­i­cal and cli­ma­to­log­i­cal top­ics and are avail­able free of charge as orig­i­nal Eng­lish-lan­guage pub­li­ca­tions. The focus is on con­di­tions cur­rent­ly expect­ed in the Baltic Sea region as a result of cli­mate change and oth­er man-made envi­ron­men­tal influ­ences. Top­ics include salin­i­ty dynam­ics of the Baltic Sea, mate­r­i­al flux­es in the catch­ment area, extreme weath­er events, sea lev­el and coastal dynam­ics, and the inter­play of var­i­ous fac­tors in the observed changes in the Baltic Sea region.

“In addi­tion to cli­mate change, there are many fac­tors in the Baltic Sea region, as in oth­er mar­gin­al seas heav­i­ly used by humans, such as agri­cul­ture, ship­ping, pol­lu­tion, or tourism, whose inter­ac­tions with each oth­er as well as with cli­mate change are poor­ly under­stood, but cli­mate change seems to influ­ence all oth­er factors.”

- Dr. Mar­cus Reckermann

An out­stand­ing con­tri­bu­tion is the sum­ma­ry of the cur­rent state of knowl­edge on cli­mate change in the Baltic Sea, the update of the two so-called BACC reports from 2008 and 2015, for which about 900 stud­ies were eval­u­at­ed and com­piled by 47 authors. “Water tem­per­a­tures in the Baltic Sea have been ris­ing for 100 years, and this will con­tin­ue in this cen­tu­ry,” says Markus Meier of the Leib­niz Insti­tute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW), chair­man of the Baltic Earth Steer­ing Group and lead author of the cur­rent cli­mate study. “Cur­rent cli­mate pro­jec­tions show that the Baltic Sea will be most­ly ice-free dur­ing nor­mal win­ters by the end of the century.”

Karol Kulińs­ki of the host insti­tute IO-PAN in Sopot, vice-chair of the Baltic Earth Steer­ing Group and lead author of one of the reports, empha­sizes the inter­na­tion­al and inter­dis­ci­pli­nary dimen­sion of this col­lab­o­ra­tion: “Sci­en­tists from all Baltic Sea coun­tries and beyond were involved in the prepa­ra­tion of the reports, as were rep­re­sen­ta­tives of all sci­en­tif­ic dis­ci­plines rel­e­vant to the Baltic Sea region­al Earth sys­tem. This gives the reports sci­en­tif­ic breadth and high cred­i­bil­i­ty,” says Kuliński.