Max Planck Institutes and Experts

Climate extremes, in particular heat waves, droughts, and their combination are inevitably increasing as a result of climate change. But little is known about how these events affect the terrestrial biosphere, which ecosystem functions are severely affected, and what feedbacks this may trigger in the climate system. At the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry we are developing new methods for the detection of extreme events in heterogeneous data streams. Our results show, among other things, how differently various ecosystems can react to extreme events.

Air pollution has been significantly underestimated as a health hazard. Calculations of the global health study Global Burden of Disease (GBD) indicated that the global mortality rate due to air pollution was around 4.5 million people a year. In a new study, we show that this number is much higher: 8.8 million per year. In Europe alone, nearly 800,000 people die prematurely every year as a result of air pollution.

With the Earth System Model of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology we have calculated the changes in the global climate system during the last 8000 years in a spatially detailed representation. This enabled us to solve part of the mystery about the end of the green Sahara. Reconstructions show a complex structure. In our simulation, the end of the humid phase is determined not only by the retreat of the monsoon but also by the change in the path of extratropical troughs. When their interplay broke up about 4000 years ago, the precipitation and vegetation in the Western Sahara rapidly decreased.

Injuries resulting from severed nerve tracts are difficult to treat sometimes requiring complex operations. We have asked ourselves: Would it be possible to stimulate nerve cells to grow using tailor-made materials? This would help the cells to close a gap in theinjured nerve. In the laboratory, we have produced an artificial material that may solve this problem and provide an alternative to surgery in the future.

Just how has nature optimized certain biological structures to optimally transduce chemistry into living systems? In the area of barrier-crossing, which takes around 100 femtoseconds, there is a proposal that nature has optimized form and function to exploit quantum effects by environmental engineering to extend coherences - even electronic coherences - on the timescale relevant to electronic motions sensitive to the environment fluctuations. In enzymatic processes lasting microseconds and above, stochastic thermally driven motions need to steer the chemistry to drive biological functions.