photo by H. Kasten

On December 5th 2017, Dr. Sabine Kasten was appointed as a full professor in sediment diagenesis at the Faculty of Geosciences of the University of Bremen. After studying geography and promoting and habilitating in geochemistry at our faculty, she moved in 2004 to the Alfred-Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven, where she has been leading the „Marine Geochemistry“ section since 2014. For many years, Prof. Kasten has been a principal investigator of the excellence cluster MARUM, where her research is focusing at non-steady-state geochemical and biogeochemical processes in marine sediments and their use as archive for (paleo)environmental reconstructions. A very timely aspect of her work are studies on global change impact on polar and sub-polar coastal and marginal seas, e.g. how glacial retreat at Antarctic and Sub-Antarctic coasts influences the iron export to the Southern Ocean. In the polar realm, iron is the most important micronutrient limiting the growth of algae in the surface waters and thus controlling the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) intake by the polar sea.