Nazik Ogretmen

Temperature and salinity are basic essential variables to describe global ocean circulation and its impact on climate and marine ecosystems. Among the two, salinity is largely understudied. Higher salinities enhance the ocean circulation, whereas lower salinities reduce it, leading to even collapse as projected in the near future. However, to date, the salinity of past ocean waters is a long-lasting unknown in paleoceanography and paleoclimate fields. Thus, the DEEP project aims to establish a proxy to reconstruct salinity changes using deep-sea benthic foraminifera. Nazik Ogretmen will focus on the low salinity end of the calibration scale for the first time to tackle the impact of salt variation in the cold polar and warm tropical regions. She will then use the proxy in various salinity regimes to study past ocean circulation and climate changes that are analogs for modern and future climates.