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On the 6th of January, the research vessel Polarstern set off from Cape Town in South Africa for an expedition of around eight weeks to the Antarctic. Extensive preventative measures have allowed the Alfred Wegener Institute to tackle important research on former instabilities of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet despite the the COVID-19 pandemic, which will be continued on two further planned expeditions in the coming years. Interested parties can follow this and subsequent Polarstern expeditions live in a new app.

Far beneath the ice shelves of the Antarctic, there is more marine life than expected, finds a recent study in the journal Current Biology, published this week (20 December 2021). Despite occupying nearly 1.6 million km2, ice shelves are amongst the least known environments on Earth. Life has been seen in these perpetual dark, cold and still habitats on camera but has rarely been collected. 

In the summer months, sea ice from the Arctic drifts through Fram Strait into the Atlantic. Thanks to meltwater, a stable layer forms around the drifting ice atop the more salty seawater, producing significant effects on biological processes and marine organisms. In turn, this has an effect on when carbon from the atmosphere is absorbed and stored, as a team of researchers led by the Alfred Wegener Institute has now determined with the aid of the FRAM ocean observation system. Their findings have just been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Can meeting CO2 emission targets and thus limiting global warming prevent Antarctic ice from melting catastrophically? An international research team is preparing to drill into the sediment of the seabed deep beneath Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf to find out.

For its 50th anniversary, the University of Bremen is organizing an online talk series to discuss how the university can help shape the major issues of our time. The next talk will take place on December 14 from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. under the title "Quick, save the climate – but how?", with AWI Director Antje Boetius as guest. The event will be broadcasted via livestream.
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Under this title, AWI Director Antje Boetius will give a lecture in the new online format "Garden Talk" on December 8 at 8:30 pm. There, she will talk about the life forms under the polar ice and thus about one of the most undiscovered regions on the planet. Afterwards, she will be available to answer questions from all participants.
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Over the past decade, interest in using the marine coastal areas as a source of alternative, sustainable food production has grown significantly. A team of experts from 28 countries, including scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) has launched the SeaWheat project as a part of the EU program “COST” to modernise traditional aquatic diet from the coastal seas to make them more sustainable and healthier.

Over the next few decades, anthropogenic climate change and the resultant changes in the global water cycle will produce a significant rise in drought frequency in the Northern Hemisphere. An international team of scientists led by climate researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute arrive at this conclusion in a new study released today in the journal npj Climate and Atmospheric Science. The experts analysed climate simulations produced by the latest generation of models for three different emissions-and-development scenarios and investigated the…

The climatic and environmental history of our planet is hidden in the ice: it harbours information on the temperature development and atmospheric composition dating back centuries and even millennia. In the context of the project Beyond EPICA-Oldest Ice, an international team of researchers hopes to unlock that information – by retrieving a core sample from the deep ice of the Antarctic, which contains climate data from the past 1.5 million years. Experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute make up part of the team. Initial drilling is about to begin.

Microplastics are everywhere, even in the most remote places. Where do these tiny pieces of plastic come from? Researchers from the University of Basel and the Alfred Wegener Institute have shown that it takes precise analysis to answer this question.