​

A joint Israel-German research team headed by Dr. Sigal Abramovich from the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences, Dr. Ahuva Almogi Labin from the Geological Survey of Israel in Jerusalem, Prof. Barak Herut from Oceanographic and Limnological Research Center in Haifa and Prof. Michal Kucera from the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, Bremen University, was recently awarded a 3 year funding grant from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology (BMBF-MOST) of approximately half a million euros.

Their research deals with the impact of climate changes on coastal environments. The goal of this research is to explore the effect of warming on foraminifera, shell-building marine unicellular organisms. These abundant creatures inhabit almost all types of marine environments and are known to be highly sensitive to environmental conditions, and therefore serve as an ideal model system for biomonitoring and for other paleoceanographic studies.

Over the past several decades, public and scientific awareness to the ongoing global warming has increased significantly. A currently accepted forecast for the next two decades is that ocean temperatures will rise at a rate of 0.2 °C per decade. Over the past 44 years a temperature increase of 1.28 °C has been recorded in the Mediterranean Sea, most of which has occurred since the 1980’s.  The rate of warming in the Mediterranean Sea, is 0.067 °C per year, more than double the global forecasts. The ecological and biological impact of this process is an urgent issue that calls for immediate attention.

 The research benefits from the unique natural experimental laboratory of the Hadera power plant heat plume, which have during the last 25 years locally raised shallow water temperatures on the coast by about 10°C on top of the natural temperature variability of the eastern Mediterranean basin. The research will include ecological survey, characterization of the genetic diversity, and temperature manipulation experiments.  The results could be directly applied to identify factors that facilitate survival of species under raised temperature and allow predictions on the possible fate of species and species interactions in a warmer world.