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A distance of around 14,000 kilometres separates Greenland from Antarctica. Nevertheless, using climate data from Antarctic ice cores, an international team of researchers succeeded in reconstructing a curve for Greenland temperature changes that goes back 800,000 years into the past, thus enabling completely new insights into the climate history of Greenland and the North Atlantic.

On the 14th of October Thomas Rachel, the German parliamentary State Secretary for the Federal Minister of Education and Research, opened the exhibition „Vivid Exhibition – Focuses of the russo-german collaboration in the field of marine and polar research“ at the State University of St.Petersburg. The touring exhibition is part of the Russo-German year of Education, Science and Innovation 2011/2012 and will visit Berlin, Munich and Bonn within the next year. The exhibition is part of the close co-operation between Germany and Russia in the fields of…

In the central Arctic the proportion of old, thick sea ice has declined significantly. Instead, the ice cover now largely consists of thin, one-year-old floes. This is one of the results that scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association brought back from the 26th Arctic expedition of the research vessel Polarstern.

A group of leading climate research organisations from eight European countries established the European Climate Research Alliance (ECRA) in the European Parliament yesterday. Prof. Dr. Karin Lochte, Director of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, signed the cooperation agreement on behalf of all research centres of the Helmholtz Association that conduct climate research.

An international team of scientists has unravelled how the first ozone hole over the Arctic formed last spring. A comprehensive analysis of the unusually high ozone depletion in March/April 2011 has now been published in advance in the online issue of the journal “Nature”.

In a stringent selection procedure the Helmholtz Association has chosen 20 junior scientists, who can now set up their own research group at one of the 17 Helmholtz centres. Three of the approved applications came from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, which thus achieved above average success.

Earth warming will presumably not lead to a permanent El Niño state in the South Pacific Ocean. This is the conclusion drawn by an international team of researchers after it investigated 50-million-year-old clam shells and wood from the Antarctic. The growth rings of these fossils indicate that there was also a climate rhythm over the South Pacific during the last prolonged interglacial phase of the Earth’s history resembling the present-day interplay of El Niño and La Niña.

The extent of sea ice in the Arctic has substantially declined to a possibly record-breaking magnitude this summer so that both the Northeast Passage and the Northwest Passage are navigable. For climate scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research these changes in the northern polar region are a good reason to conduct research on the prospects and consequences of increased commercial use of the Arctic. ACCESS is the name of this forward-looking project whose second workshop takes place in Bremen on 5 and 6 September.

You can’t get any “higher”: on 22 August 2011 the research icebreaker Polarstern of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association reaches the North Pole. The aim of he current expedition is to document changes in the far north. Thus, the researchers on board are conducting an extensive investigation programme in the water, ice and air at the northernmost point on the Earth. The little sea ice cover makes the route via the pole to the investigation area in the Canadian Arctic possible.

For the first time researchers have examined on a global scale how calcified algae in their natural habitat react to increasing acidification due to higher marine uptake of carbon dioxide.