Geophysicist Benedikt Haimerl Receives Annette Barthelt Prize

20 March 2026, by ch

Today, three early-career researchers were honored for their outstanding theses at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel for the 39th time. One of them, the marine geophysicist Benedikt Haimerl from University of Hamburg, received the Annette Barthelt Prize for his MSc-thesis, “Machine Learning-based Denoising of Seismic Reflection Data for the Reconstruction of the Largest Waterfall in the Geological Record,” completed at the University of Hamburg. He was supervised by Prof. Dr. Christian Hübscher and Prof. Dr. Conny Hammer.

Using methods from the field of artificial intelligence, he filtered seismic data collected during an international METEOR expedition in the Mediterranean led by Hamburg. The results of this innovative processing approach suggest the existence of a paleo-waterfall over a steep escarpment dropping 2,200 meters over a distance of 20 kilometers.

This feature likely represents the largest waterfall in Earth’s history. It is thought to have formed at the end of the Messinian Salinity Crisis (5–6 million years ago, when the Mediterranean Sea largely dried out), when a catastrophic megaflood refilled the eastern Mediterranean with Atlantic water.

You will find the press release here.