We are organising a “dusty session” for the EGU general assembly, 22 - 27 April 2012 in Vienna, Austria. Peter Knippertz and me are hoping to receive a lot of interesting abstracts in order to make a truly interdisciplinary session again. We have the commitments of three solicited speakers already: Albert Ansmann (Leipzig), Nicolas Huneeus (Paris), and Hongbo Zheng (Nanjing)

Ute Merkel and me organised a very successful dusty workshop, which was sponsored by MARUM and PAGES in Bremen in November 2011. Have a look at the workshop’s website, to see what we discussed.

Frau Doctor (!) Inka Meyer successfully defended her thesis on Monday 2nd May.
As she is “my” very first PhD student, I’m very pleased about her success!

My proposal for a floating dust collector was granted, meaning that we’ll be able to study present-day dust deposition off Mauritania and compare the results with the sediment-trap data from the Cape-Blanc traps and those that Prof. Prospero collected on Barbados.

Noorderlicht passed by at NIOZ to film an update for the Beagle project. “My” update can be seen on June 14, 19:45, Channel 2.
Click here for the Noorderlicht website and other updates.

We organised a session “Late Quaternary climate trends: expression and causation” for the XVIII INQUA meeting, 21 - 27 July in Bern, Switzerland. We got a great number of abstracts together with very interesting speakers and presentations!

We organised a “dusty session” for the EGU general assembly, 3 - 8 April in Vienna, Austria
We (Peter Knippertz & me) received 32 abstracts for our session and it was a great one again with many interesting presentations from the whole range of disciplines that deal with dust.

Our Nature paper is out! Click here for the press release (NL or UK)
Nature does not permit to publish the PDF, but the proof is allowed.
Otherwise use the doi to find the original paper: doi:10.1038/nature09213

Setting up a special volume in Quaternary International after the Southern-Connections 2010 meeting, Bariloche, Argentina, 15-19 February 2010.
Session: "Controversies in the Quaternary of the Southern Hemisphere"
Click ~here for the call for papers.
And/or visit the SC2010 website for more info.

Dust storms in Australia.
Due to the drying up of Lake Eyre that was full (austral) autumn 2009,
Australia was suffering from heavy dust loads in (austral) spring.
See e.g., this news item on the Dutch television, and many more on the web.

As there was a LOT of rain in Queensland in February-March 2010, but as 2010 is a strong La Niña year, there was even more rain in Lake Eyre in spring: no dust