News

The mean temperature of the Earth's surface has risen noticeably  over the past decades. This warming is to a large extent due to the anthropogenic emissions of CO2 that amplify the natural greenhouse effect. Observations show, however, that there has been hardly or almost no increase in the surface temperature of inland Antarctica over the same period.

This year emissions could decline by 0.6 per cent, according to researchers of the Global Carbon Project. The results appeared in the online journal Earth System Science Data.

The upcoming Saturday, 5th December 2015, the European Polar Board, the scientific project ICE-ARC and the consortium EU-PolarNet, which is managed by the Alfred Wegener Institute, host an official side event during this year’s UN climate conference. The focus of the event lies on how climate change affects the Arctic and which global consequences the changes in the High North draw with them.

The German research vessel Polarstern will arrive tomorrow in Cape Town after a five week voyage. During this training cruise from Bremerhaven to South Africa 32 international young scientists were trained in how to observe and measure the vital signs of the Atlantic Ocean.

The German Research Foundation (DFG) supports the new Transregional Collaborative Research Centre TR 172 “Arctic climate change” represented by the speaker Prof. Dr. Manfred Wendisch, meteorologist from Leipzig University, during the next four years. In January 2016 the research network will start. Research partners in the project are the Alfred Wegener Institute, the Leipzig University, the University of Bremen, the University of Cologne and the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) in Leipzig. It is the first systematic large-scale…

The warming of arctic waters in the wake of climate change is likely to produce radical changes in the marine habitats of the High North. This is indicated by data from long-term observations in the Fram Strait, which researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) have now analysed. Their most important finding: even a short-term influx of warm water into the Arctic Ocean would suffice to fundamentally impact the local symbiotic communities, from the water’s surface down to the deep seas. As the authors recently reported in the journal “Ecological…

Melting glaciers are causing a loss of species diversity among benthos in the coastal waters off the Antarctic Peninsula, impacting an entire seafloor ecosystem. This has been verified in the course of repeated research dives, the results of which were recently published by experts from Argentina, Germany and Great Britain and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in a study in the journal Science Advances. The scientists believe increased levels of suspended sediment in the water to be the cause of the…

Our new map of the Antarctic continent and the seafloor of the Southern Ocean, which we have created with the TU Dresden’s Institute for Cartography, will be shown in the Hall of Fame of Cartography.

The ice-covered Arctic Ocean is a more important factor concerning the concentration of the greenhouse gas methane in the atmosphere than previously assumed. Experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) report on the newly discovered interactions between the atmosphere, sea ice and the ocean in a recent online study in the journal Nature’s Scientific Reports.

AWI modeller Nils Hutter wrote one of the year's best Master's theses in the University of Bremen's Environmental Physics degree programme. In recognition of his academic performance, he will be awarded the 2015 OHB Prize by the University's Faculty 1 on 27 November 2015.