We finished an other round of field work in the Schorfheide area, which was focused on sedimentological aspects, gemorphological mapping, and sampling for sediment dating. Thank you to all my dear colleagues and friends who have been so supportive during my fieldwork over the past few weeks!
I’m delighted to announce that my chapter on „The Geomorphology of the City of Berlin“ is out now in the book „Landscapes and Landforms of Germany“ edited by F. Lehmkuhl, M. Böse, and M. Krautblatter. It makes me happy having contributed to the World Geomorphological Landscapes Series, especially as some of the books in this series, especially those about Ethiopia and Afar, have been incredibly helpful to me in the past.
My chapter about Berlin outlines the general geological, geochronological and geomorphological framework of the city area, highlighting several exemplary landscape features. The text goes on to discuss some examples of young salt movements, such as in Lübars, where the salt has pushed Oligocene clays to the surface and where also some surface cracks can be found.
I’ve also co-authored a chapter on the „Morphological Transformation of the Landscape in Lower Lusatia by Opencast Mining“ in the same series together with Margot Böse.
Hardt, J. (2025). The Geomorphology of the City of Berlin. In: Lehmkuhl, F., Böse, M., Krautblatter, M. (eds) Landscapes and Landforms of Germany. World Geomorphological Landscapes. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-77876-6_8
Böse, M., Hardt, J. (2025). Morphological Transformation of the Landscape in Lower Lusatia by Opencast Mining. In: Lehmkuhl, F., Böse, M., Krautblatter, M. (eds) Landscapes and Landforms of Germany. World Geomorphological Landscapes. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-77876-6_10
In September 2025, we’ve spent two weeks in the crack cluster of the Schorfheide forests, which are located at the surface above the southern tip of the “Groß Schönebeck” salt pillow. The focus of the campaign was to collect shallow 2D seismic data (P wave and S wave) using the Elvis micro vibro seis-system and a land streamer (for the S waves; as described, e.g., in Krawzcyk et al., 2012) . We’ve successfully completed the data collection and are now turning our attention to the data analysis.
My sincere thanks to the entire team for their consistently very intensive work. Thanks also to the biosphere reserve, the nature conservation authority, and the forestry office, who made our work possible.
The Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA) workshop took place in Sidney, British Columbia, Canada, from June 2 – 6. I have had a virtual talk in the session Interactions of GIA and tectonics titled „Ice sheet induced salt tectonics – observations and modeling results from northern Germany“ co-authored by Dr. Tim P. Dooley (UT Austin). I gave a brief overview of the surface cracks and then focused on the key results of our physical modeling study (Hardt et al., 2024).
Thanks a lot to the organizers and thanks for giving me the opportunity to present our results!
Here we will post updates on the progress of this DFG-funded project. The start date is in summer of 2025.
