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In spring 2025, the Director of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Prof Antje Boetius, will be appointed president of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in California. MBARI is one of the most esteemed institutes for marine research and technologies. Based on the US Pacific Coast, it specializes in exploring the deep sea and its unknown diversity of life. “This position will give me a unique opportunity to contribute to the development of innovative deep-sea technologies with a focus on imaging, robotics, sensor systems and AI,” says the…

Sparse sea ice, thousands of datapoints and samples, a surprising number of animals and hydrothermal vents – those are the impressions and outcomes that an international research team is now bringing back from a Polarstern expedition to the Central Arctic. After a four-month-long Arctic season, the Alfred Wegener Institute’s research icebreaker is expected to arrive back in Bremerhaven with the morning high tide on Sunday. 

The global production of plastics and the resulting plastic waste has increased to such an extent that plastics have become ubiquitous in our environment. Plastics of various sizes are also found along the German North Sea and Baltic coasts. Previous studies of microplastic pollution on German beaches have often been limited to a few locations. In the citizen science project “Microplastic Detectives”, researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, together with citizens, have now collected samples from beaches along the entire German coast to be analyzed…

Northeast Greenland is home to the 79° N Glacier – the country’s largest floating glacier tongue, but also one seriously threatened by global warming: warm water from the Atlantic is melting it from below. Experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute have however now determined that the temperature of the water flowing into the glacier cavern declined from 2018 to 2021, even though the ocean has steadily warmed in the region over the past several decades. This could be due to temporarily changed atmospheric circulation patterns. In a study just released in…

Photosynthesis can take place in nature even at extremely low light levels. This is the result of an international study that investigated the development of Arctic microalgae at the end of the polar night. The measurements were carried out as part of the MOSAiC expedition at 88° northern latitude and revealed that even this far north, microalgae can build up biomass through photosynthesis as early as the end of March. At this time, the sun is barely above the horizon, so that it is still almost completely dark in the microalgae's habitat under the snow…

In the Arctic Archipelago Svalbard, this August roughly 20 experts from seven German universities and research centres set up their labs and instruments for the polar research project YESSS (Year-round EcoSystem Study on Svalbard). Coordinated by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), YESSS is intended to yield new insights into climate change effects. To help make that a reality, a small team of researchers – and this is the unique aspect – will also spend the long, dark seasons at AWIPEV research station in…

In 2001, Prof Karen Wiltshire began investigating changes in the ecosystems of the North Sea, particularly in the Wadden Sea, in connection with anthropogenic and natural influences – like climate change – at the Alfred Wegener Institute. Five years later, she was appointed Vice Director and Director of the AWI’s Biological Institute Helgoland. After working more than two decades in the High North, she assumed a new position at Trinity College Dublin and will found a new climate institute in the Irish capital. For this purpose, she will be on leave. Prof…

For a long time, scientists assumed that jellyfish were a dead-end food source for predatory fish. However, a team from the Alfred Wegener Institute together with the Thünen Institute has now discovered that fish in Greenland waters do indeed feed on jellyfish. In two of the analyzed species, they even made up the majority of the food, as the researchers describe in a study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. The results suggest that the role of jellyfish as prey in marine food webs should be reconsidered, especially in regards to the…

Industrial waste lurks in thousands of sites in the Arctic permafrost regions – some of it is highly toxic. If the permafrost thaws increasingly deeper due to the massive warming of the Arctic deeper and becomes unstable, ecosystems and the local communities can be endangered by the waste. In August, researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, together with national and international partners, therefore, keep a close eye on drilling mud pits in the Mackenzie Delta in which residues from oil and gas exploration are stored. The expedition is part of the…

Climate change can produce a range of effects on flat sedimentary coasts. Researchers from the Wadden Sea Station on Sylt have just released a multidisciplinary overview of the far-reaching climate-based changes in the Wadden Sea, a listed World Heritage Site. The review paper in celebration of the station’s centennial was published in the journal Marine Biodiversity. It covers the coastal morphology, including sediment dynamics, as well as the biology, from genetic effects to interspecies interactions, to the ecosystem level.