At their annual conference on 16.09.2013, the German Mineralogical Society (DMG) presented Dr. Hella Wittmann Oelze with the Victor Moritz Goldschmidt Award for her outstanding contributions in the field of geochemistry of cosmogenic nuclides. These allow accurate determinations of material cycles and ages of the earth's surface.

On the basis of documenting cosmogenic nuclides in river sediments, Dr. Wittmann-Oelze was the first to show that the elevation of the central Swiss Alps, determined with geodetic methods, is a result of erosion. Elevation and erosion correlate over a wide range of these rates.

Furthermore, Dr. Wittmann-Oelze devoted herself to the advancement of the method. She managed to successfully apply the method of in-situ cosmogenic nuclides in large sedimentary basins such as the Amazon basin. She was able to quantify recent and past sediment flows of the Amazon and its side arms, thus determining that the entire amount of sediment that is produced in the Andes is transported via the Amazon River into the Atlantic Ocean. The Amazon basin is therefore not a catch basin for sediment, although it has the world's largest floodplain. Rather, it works as a large "shock absorber", cushioning the changes in sediment transport. This "shock absorber" is able to keep the amount of exported sediment constant, even across different climatic time periods of the Holocene.

With her fundamental work, Dr. Wittmann-Oelze demonstrated the enormous potential of the in-situ nuclide method with which recent and past sediment fluxes from terrestrial and marine archives can be reconstructed and interactions between fluid and rock can be explored.

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Past winners of the VM Goldschmidt Award

Article in the GFZ staff magazine (German only): "The longest sand factory of the Earth"