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The Pine Island Glacier in Western Antarctica is not only one of the fastest-flowing ice streams in the Southern Hemisphere; over the past eleven years, four major icebergs have calved from its floating tongue. In February 2017, researchers on board the German research icebreaker Polarstern successfully mapped an area of seafloor previously covered by shelf ice. A comparison of these new maps with satellite images of the ice stream reveals why the glacier suddenly retreated toward the coast: at important points, it had lost contact with the ground, as…

The findings are from a major climate assessment known as the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE), and are published today in Nature. It is the most complete picture of Antarctic ice sheet change to date - 84 scientists from 44 international organisations combined 24 satellite surveys to produce the assessment.

The seas and oceans are climate machines, living and economic areas at the same time. They supply raw materials and food, serve as transport routes and recreational areas. But this space is also under threat: from littering and overfishing to global warming. To protect the oceans, the United Nations (UN) celebrates World Oceans Day on 8 June each year.

In the autumn, the waters surrounding the Antarctic Peninsula were still home to large quantities of krill and salps, ready to spawn. Thanks to warmer water temperatures, the ice formation began later in the year, as a result of which single-celled algae, the chief food source for these organisms, were available in higher concentrations. How life in the Southern Ocean will adapt to such changes was a central topic during this year’s Antarctic season on board the research vessel Polarstern, which will end when, on Monday 11 June 2018, the ship returns to…

On May 25, the European Parliamentarian Regine Meißner (3rd from the left) visited Helgoland. In the lobster hall of the Biological Institute, Maarten Boersma reports on current projects. AWI Director Antje Boetius (r.) discussed with Meißner about EU research policy.

Anyone concerned with the development of the global climate, rising sea levels or changes in marine ecosystems must always keep the polar regions in mind. The Arctic and Antarctic, for example, play a central role in the system of global ocean currents, and the large but shrinking ice sheets are important factors in the Earth's radiation balance.

Today, only the eldest inhabitants of the Danube Delta recall that, in the past, you could skate on the river practically every winter; since the second half of the 20th century, Europe’s second-largest river has only rarely frozen over. The reason: the rising winter and water temperatures in Central and Eastern Europe, as a German-Romanian research team recently determined. Their analysis has just been published in the online magazine Scientific Reports.

A few months ago, the GRACE mission’s two Earth observation satellites burnt up in the atmosphere. Although this loss was planned, for the experts at the Alfred Wegener Institute it left a considerable gap in monitoring ice loss in the Antarctic and Greenland. Now the follow-up mission will finally be launched, and will play a vital role in predicting future sea level rise.

Tiny gypsum crystals can make phytoplankton so heavy that they rapidly sink, hereby transporting large quantities of carbon to the ocean’s depths. Experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute recently observed this phenomenon for the first time in the Arctic. As a result of this massive algal transport, in the future large amounts of nutrients could be lost from the surface waters.

A new method for projecting how the temperature will respond to human impacts supports the outlook for substantial global warming throughout this century – but also indicates that, in many regions, warming patterns are likely to vary significantly from those estimated by widely used computer models.