Bremen and all its technology!

Today we toured the Marum Institute during the morning, which is a part of the Bremen University.

MARUM is the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences of the University of Bremen, and is one of the leading oceanography and marine science research centers in the world. They do research on the ocean floor up to 4,000 meters. They have 2 ROV (remote operated vehicles (red) and 1 AOV (autonomous operated vehicle (yellow). The red ROV dives down to 4,000 meters or the ocean floor and is able to pick up things with the two arms, take core samples from the ocean floor, and take high powered very intimate pictures of the flora, fauna and lifeforms living there. We were shown a video of the shots that the camera can take and the pictures were beautiful. So close to very, very tiny things. It was lovely. The ROV runs with two pilots and two scientists constantly monitoring it. The team consists of 8 pilots and 8 scientists so that they can work in shifts as of course the dive is very expensive so you must make the most of it. I can’t imagine being stuck inside this container with four other people for hours on end operating mechanical arms with my partner pilot manipulating the cameras so i can see what I am doing. Whew!! We also got a tour of the ocean core storeroom. It is a room that is 4 degrees celcius where all the samples of the earth’s core are archived and used for experiments. There are only three storerooms in the world, and they are College Station, TX, Bremen, Germany and Kochi, Japan. In this picture you can see that time is kept for all three places as each store is on the same computer system.

After our tour of Marum, we attended lunch at Campus restaurant with Michael Gobel and Hans Jurgen and his wife (he is the coordinator for all the GSE teams in Germany). It was a lovely lunch with many interesting facts revealed about the GSE selection process in Germany and Rotary in general.

We sat directly across from our next stop, the Universum Museum. It felt like the Aquarium, everything was a hands on experiment. THe first picture is the actual museum, which looks like a football. The others are just me and Lisa having a laugh. It seemed mostly for kids, but once we were there for a little bit, Lisa and I definitely got into it.

We exited the museum and drove to Bremen Center (old Bremen) and Schnoor Strasse, which means “string Street” ‘cause the houses are so close together. We had dinner at the Katzen Kafe with our Bremen Rotary GSE team, Michael, Herr Jugen and President Pfieffer (who by the way is a riot). All those things we Americans heard about the German sense of humor being hard to understand....NOT TRUE!

What a wonderful way to end the day!