Abstract. Based on the Baltic Earth Assessment Reports of this thematic issue in Earth System Dynamics and recent peer-reviewed literature, current knowledge about the effects of global warming on past and future changes in climate of the Baltic Sea region is summarized and assessed. The study is an update of the Second Assessment of Climate Change (BACC II) published in 2015 and focusses on the atmosphere, land, cryosphere, ocean, sediments and the terrestrial and marine biosphere. Based on the summaries of the recent knowledge gained in paleo-, historical and future regional climate research, we find that the main conclusions from earlier assessments remain still valid. However, new long-term, homogenous observational records, e.g. for Scandinavian glacier inventories, sea-level driven saltwater inflows, so-called Major Baltic Inflows, and phytoplankton species distribution and new scenario simulations with improved models, e.g. for glaciers, lake ice and marine food web, have become available. In many cases, uncertainties can now be better estimated than before, because more models can be included in the ensembles, especially for the Baltic Sea. With the help of coupled models, feedbacks between several components of the Earth System have been studied and multiple driver studies were performed, e.g. projections of the food web that include fisheries, eutrophication and climate change. New data sets and projections have led to a revised understanding of changes in some variables such as salinity. Furthermore, it has become evident that natural variability, in particular for the ocean on multidecadal time scales, is greater than previously estimated, challenging our ability to detect observed and projected changes in climate. In this context, the first paleoclimate simulations regionalized for the Baltic Sea region are instructive. Hence, estimated uncertainties for the projections of many variables increased. In addition to the well-known influence of the North Atlantic Oscillation, it was found that also other low-frequency modes of internal variability, such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Variability, have profound effects on the climate of the Baltic Sea region. Challenges were also identified, such as the systematic discrepancy between future cloudiness trends in global and regional models and the difficulty of confidently attributing large observed changes in marine ecosystems to climate change. Finally, we compare our results with other coastal sea assessments, such as the North Sea Region Climate Change Assessment (NOSCCA) and find that the effects of climate change on the Baltic Sea differ from those on the North Sea, since Baltic Sea oceanography and ecosystems are very different from other coastal seas such as the North Sea. While the North Sea dynamics is dominated by tides, the Baltic Sea is characterized by brackish water, a perennial vertical stratification in the southern sub-basins and a seasonal sea ice cover in the northern sub-basins.
Robin Spanier, Thorsten Hoeser, John Truckenbrodt
et al.
The increasing use of marine spaces by offshore infrastructure, including oil and gas platforms, underscores the need for consistent, scalable monitoring. Offshore development has economic, environmental, and regulatory implications, yet maritime areas remain difficult to monitor systematically due to their inaccessibility and spatial extent. This study presents an automated approach to the spatiotemporal detection of offshore oil and gas platforms based on freely available Earth observation data. Leveraging Sentinel-1 archive data and deep learning-based object detection, a consistent quarterly time series of platform locations for three major production regions: the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Persian Gulf, was created for the period 2017-2025. In addition, platform size, water depth, distance to the coast, national affiliation, and installation and decommissioning dates were derived. 3,728 offshore platforms were identified in 2025, 356 in the North Sea, 1,641 in the Gulf of Mexico, and 1,731 in the Persian Gulf. While expansion was observed in the Persian Gulf until 2024, the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea saw a decline in platform numbers from 2018-2020. At the same time, a pronounced dynamic was apparent. More than 2,700 platforms were installed or relocated to new sites, while a comparable number were decommissioned or relocated. Furthermore, the increasing number of platforms with short lifespans points to a structural change in the offshore sector associated with the growing importance of mobile offshore units such as jack-ups or drillships. The results highlighted the potential of freely available Earth observation data and deep learning for consistent, long-term monitoring of marine infrastructure. The derived dataset is public and provides a basis for offshore monitoring, maritime planning, and analyses of the transformation of the offshore energy sector.
Verena Blaschke, Miriam Winkler, Constantin Förster
et al.
Although Germany has a diverse landscape of dialects, they are underrepresented in current automatic speech recognition (ASR) research. To enable studies of how robust models are towards dialectal variation, we present Betthupferl, an evaluation dataset containing four hours of read speech in three dialect groups spoken in Southeast Germany (Franconian, Bavarian, Alemannic), and half an hour of Standard German speech. We provide both dialectal and Standard German transcriptions, and analyze the linguistic differences between them. We benchmark several multilingual state-of-the-art ASR models on speech translation into Standard German, and find differences between how much the output resembles the dialectal vs. standardized transcriptions. Qualitative error analyses of the best ASR model reveal that it sometimes normalizes grammatical differences, but often stays closer to the dialectal constructions.
Miriam Anschütz, Thanh Mai Pham, Eslam Nasrallah
et al.
The ability to paraphrase texts across different complexity levels is essential for creating accessible texts that can be tailored toward diverse reader groups. Thus, we introduce German4All, the first large-scale German dataset of aligned readability-controlled, paragraph-level paraphrases. It spans five readability levels and comprises over 25,000 samples. The dataset is automatically synthesized using GPT-4 and rigorously evaluated through both human and LLM-based judgments. Using German4All, we train an open-source, readability-controlled paraphrasing model that achieves state-of-the-art performance in German text simplification, enabling more nuanced and reader-specific adaptations. We opensource both the dataset and the model to encourage further research on multi-level paraphrasing
The development of a kilometer-scale E3SM Land Model (km-scale ELM) is an integral part of the E3SM project, which seeks to advance energy-related Earth system science research with state-of-the-art modeling and simulation capabilities on exascale computing systems. Through the utilization of high-fidelity data products, such as atmospheric forcing and soil properties, the km-scale ELM plays a critical role in accurately modeling geographical characteristics and extreme weather occurrences. The model is vital for enhancing our comprehension and prediction of climate patterns, as well as their effects on ecosystems and human activities. This study showcases the first set of full-capability, km-scale ELM simulations over various computational domains, including simulations encompassing 21.6 million land gridcells, reflecting approximately 21.5 million square kilometers of North America at a 1 km x 1 km resolution. We present the largest km-scale ELM simulation using up to 100,800 CPU cores across 2,400 nodes. This continental-scale simulation is 300 times larger than any previous studies, and the computational resources used are about 400 times larger than those used in prior efforts. Both strong and weak scaling tests have been conducted, revealing exceptional performance efficiency and resource utilization. The km-scale ELM uses the common E3SM modeling infrastructure and a general data toolkit known as KiloCraft. Consequently, it can be readily adapted for both fully-coupled E3SM simulations and data-driven simulations over specific areas, ranging from a single gridcell to the entire North America.
The optimal conditions of electro-optic interaction in lead germanate crystals are determined and the geometries of the electro-optic cells of modulators of infrared electromagnetic radiation are proposed.
Gianluca Nogara, Francesco Pierri, Stefano Cresci
et al.
Proprietary public APIs play a crucial and growing role as research tools among social scientists. Among such APIs, Google's machine learning-based Perspective API is extensively utilized for assessing the toxicity of social media messages, providing both an important resource for researchers and automatic content moderation. However, this paper exposes an important bias in Perspective API concerning German language text. Through an in-depth examination of several datasets, we uncover intrinsic language biases within the multilingual model of Perspective API. We find that the toxicity assessment of German content produces significantly higher toxicity levels than other languages. This finding is robust across various translations, topics, and data sources, and has significant consequences for both research and moderation strategies that rely on Perspective API. For instance, we show that, on average, four times more tweets and users would be moderated when using the German language compared to their English translation. Our findings point to broader risks associated with the widespread use of proprietary APIs within the computational social sciences.
The North Sámi (NS) language encapsulates four primary dialectal variants that are related but that also have differences in their phonology, morphology, and vocabulary. The unique geopolitical location of NS speakers means that in many cases they are bilingual in Sámi as well as in the dominant state language: Norwegian, Swedish, or Finnish. This enables us to study the NS variants both with respect to the spoken state language and their acoustic characteristics. In this paper, we investigate an extensive set of acoustic features, including MFCCs and prosodic features, as well as state-of-the-art self-supervised representations, namely, XLS-R, WavLM, and HuBERT, for the automatic detection of the four NS variants. In addition, we examine how the majority state language is reflected in the dialects. Our results show that NS dialects are influenced by the state language and that the four dialects are separable, reaching high classification accuracy, especially with the XLS-R model.
Julia Gravendyck, Martin Schobben, J. Bachelier
et al.
Abstract The end-Triassic mass extinction is often linked to environmental and climate change triggered by the activity of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province ca. 201 Mya. In the German Triassic Basin, the transition from pre-extinction to the so-called extinction interval is documented from the fossil-rich Contorta Beds to the mostly barren Triletes Beds. However, despite the lack of macrofossils, plant microfossils are present and studying palynomorph diversity and assemblages still give us a detailed insight into the impact of environmental changes on the flora. Here, we present data from 64 samples taken from the new Triassic-Jurassic section ‘Bonenburgʼ, which originates from a brick quarry in North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany), and encompasses the Triassic–Jurassic transition in the Germanic Basin. Using palynofacies analysis, we document changes in the depositional environment. Based on terrestrial and marine palynological analysis, we also document quantitative changes in four assemblage zones for correlation with other European sections. Further, we discuss the vegetation history with special focus on the transition from the pre-extinction to extinction interval (Contorta to Triletes Beds). Additionally, we investigate palynofloral diversity patterns especially prior to the Triassic-Jurassic transition, to evaluate the ecological impact of environmental upheaval on the flora. Furthermore, we document intraspecific palynomorph variability, indicating a variety of aberrant spore, pollen, and tetrad formation, in the middle Rhaetian, the lowermost upper Rhaetian, and the lowest Hettangian. Our study supports existing paleogeographical reconstructions for the region and reveals, that vegetation underwent gradual changes with intermediate successional stages rather than dramatic extinction or drastic turnover as documented for animals. Diversity patterns coinciding with aberrant palynomorph occurrences, potentially associated with episodes of increased environmental stress, suggest three disturbances pulses of probably increasing severity. Although environmental stress in the context of diversity patterns seems a likely explanation for the occurrence of aberrant palynomorphs, further investigations are needed to better understand the underlying mechanisms and their evolutionary significance and temporal connection with biotic crises.
AbstractUsing theCorpus der altdeutschen Originalurkunden‘Corpus of Old German Original Charters’ (Wilhelm et al. 1932–2004), we will show that charters offer valuable information on dialectological differences during the Middle High German period. This text genre is unsurpassed in terms of its geographical resolution even though it faces certain challenges due to its partially formulaic style. With two well-known phenomena, i.e. inflected forms of the infinitive (‘gerunds’) and so-called ‘contracted’ verbs likehaben/hân‘have’, we will show how these materials can be analysed and put into perspective with other sources like the newMittelhochdeutsche GrammatikbyKlein, Solms & Wegera (2018).
Abstract Typologically, the Old and Middle Scandinavian languages preserve features lost in Modern Scandinavian (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish), especially zero arguments and inactive constructions. Both phenomena present difficulties for the analysis of the Old and Middle Scandinavian languages as configurational, and generative linguists often choose a reductionist strategy, claiming that at the level of deep structure, configurational structure persists. Based on Middle Danish, my claim will be that zero arguments are semantically different from – and therefore cannot be reduced to – pronouns, and secondly, that inactive constructions do not have oblique subjects, but oblique first arguments (A1s). The meanings of the case forms nominative and oblique differ, depending on their constructional context. Any functional theory must respect the relevant grammatical sign contrasts of the language analysed, not try to explain them away.
Abstract The Gothic translation of the Bible is a word-for-word rendition of a lost Greek Vorlage (reconstructed by W. Streitberg in 1908; 2nd revised edition in 1919). As previous studies have pointed out, one of the most interesting features of this version is the presence of the overt subject pronoun in instances where there is a null subject in Greek. Considering that Gothic is a null subject language, how is it possible to justify this feature? Based on a new collation that uses biblical textual witnesses not considered by Streitberg (i.e. Greek majuscule and minuscule manuscripts, Church Fathers, commentaries, lectionaries, and Vetus Latina manuscripts), this paper analyses the Gothic-Greek divergences involving the presence of the overt subject pronoun in the Gospel of John, in order to verify previous hypotheses and shed new light on this debated topic.
During World War II the German army used tanks to devastating advantage. The Allies needed accurate estimates of their tank production and deployment. They used two approaches to find these values: spies, and statistics. This note describes the statistical approach. Assuming the tanks are labeled consecutively starting at 1, if we observe $k$ serial numbers from an unknown number $N$ of tanks, with the maximum observed value $m$, then the best estimate for $N$ is $m(1 + 1/k) - 1$. This is now known as the German Tank Problem, and is a terrific example of the applicability of mathematics and statistics in the real world. The first part of the paper reproduces known results, specifically deriving this estimate and comparing its effectiveness to that of the spies. The second part presents a result we have not found in print elsewhere, the generalization to the case where the smallest value is not necessarily 1. We emphasize in detail why we are able to obtain such clean, closed-form expressions for the estimates, and conclude with an appendix highlighting how to use this problem to teach regression and how statistics can help us find functional relationships.
AbstractAn je einem Beispiel möchte ich folgendes zeigen: Einmal, wie sich an einem erst jüngst aufgefundenen Goldstück binnen kurzem mehrere Deutungen anhängen und mit welchen Kriterien diese bewertet werden können. Zum anderen geht es um ein schon länger bekanntes Goldstück, insbesondere um eine neue Lesung seiner Runeninschrift, die, zügig von anderen gutgeheißen bzw. übernommen, hier erneut betrachtet werden soll, um die alte Lesung zu restituieren. Die dafür gewählten Beispiele, 1. der Goldbrakteat von IK 639 Trollhättan (II)-C und 2. der Goldsolidus von Schweindorf, haben in Vortrag und Diskussion auf dem Symposium in Odense am 14. März 2017 eine Rolle gespielt.
The Bajamar Star is an early O star that ionizes the North America/Pelican Nebulae. In projection, it is near the geometric center of the H II region, but appears to lie outside any of the main stellar subgroups. Furthermore, in Gaia DR2, there were slight discrepancies between this star and the rest of the system in parallax (2$σ$ larger) and relative tangential velocity (~6 km/s). Using Gaia EDR3, we find that the parallax discrepancy has disappeared, but the velocity difference remains. These results are consistent with the star having escaped from a subgroup.
Discussion about the social network Twitter often concerns its role in political discourse, involving the question of when an expression of opinion becomes offensive, immoral, and/or illegal, and how to deal with it. Given the growing amount of offensive communication on the internet, there is a demand for new technology that can automatically detect hate speech, to assist content moderation by humans. This comes with new challenges, such as defining exactly what is free speech and what is illegal in a specific country, and knowing exactly what the linguistic characteristics of hate speech are. To shed light on the German situation, we analyzed over 50,000 right-wing German hate tweets posted between August 2017 and April 2018, at the time of the 2017 German federal elections, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. In this paper, we discuss the results of the analysis and demonstrate how the insights can be employed for the development of automatic detection systems.
Markus Mühling, Manja Meister, Nikolaus Korfhage
et al.
The German Broadcasting Archive (DRA) maintains the cultural heritage of radio and television broadcasts of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). The uniqueness and importance of the video material stimulates a large scientific interest in the video content. In this paper, we present an automatic video analysis and retrieval system for searching in historical collections of GDR television recordings. It consists of video analysis algorithms for shot boundary detection, concept classification, person recognition, text recognition and similarity search. The performance of the system is evaluated from a technical and an archival perspective on 2,500 hours of GDR television recordings.
Grammaticalization as standardly conceived is a change whereby an item develops from a lexical to a grammatical or functional meaning, or from being less to more grammatical. In this article we show that this can only be part of the story; for a full account we need to understand the syntactic structures into which grammaticalizing elements fit and how they too develop. To achieve this end we consider in detail the history of definiteness marking within the noun phrase in North Germanic, and in particular in Faroese. We show how this change requires us to distinguish between projecting and nonprojecting categories, and how a category can emerge over time and only subsequently develop into a head with its own associated functional projection. The necessary structure, rather than being intrinsic to an aprioristic universal grammar, grows over time as part of the grammaticalization process. We suggest that this in turn argues for a parallel correspondence theory of grammar such as the one adopted here, LEXICAL-FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR, in which different dimensions of linguistic structure can change at different rates.