News

40 years of research in the Arctic, Antarctic and in coastal regions: on 15 July, the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) celebrates its 40th anniversary. With its innovative science and excellent research infrastructure, the AWI has become a global leader and internationally recognised centre for climate research in the two polar regions and the world’s oceans.

The Helmholtz Climate Initiative has completely revised its website. It now offers articles, background information, fact sheets and much more on the current state of climate research. AWI researchers can also be reached via the new expert placement service. Learn more

The New Siberian Islands were the birthplace of the MOSAiC floe: the sea ice in which the research vessel Polarstern is now drifting through the Arctic was formed off the coast of the archipelago, which separates the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea to the north of Siberia, in December 2018. Sediments, and even small pebbles and bivalves, were incorporated into the ice during the freezing process, which the on-going melting process has brought to light on the surface of the MOSAiC floe. This is an increasingly rare phenomenon as nowadays most of the…

The AWIPEV station team sends midsummer greetings from Ny-Ålesund. The summer solstice is celebrated in the science village at 79 degrees north annually. More information about the station.

“A library means thinking, learning, fantasising, being safe - and above all, being surrounded by knowledge,” explains Prof. Dr Karen Wiltshire, Deputy Director of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), in her speech at the opening of the Rosenthal Reading Room at the AWI Wadden Sea Station Sylt. She thanked Prof. Dr Harald Rosenthal from the bottom of her heart, who has now handed over almost a third of his private library to the research station: 55 linear metres of specialist literature.

Scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) have published ground-breaking findings on the effects of climate change for fish stocks around the globe. As they report today in the Journal Science, the risks to fish are much higher than previously assumed, essentially due to the fact that some life stages are extremely sensitive to warming. The most critical bottleneck in the lifecycle of fish is their low heat tolerance during reproduction. In other words, the water temperature in their spawning areas…

The Instagram live format "Coffee Break" is going into the next round: returnees of the MOSAiC expedition report live about their experiences in the Central Arctic. On 2nd of July, from 4 p.m., Stefanie Arndt and Janin Schaffer chat over a cup of coffee about their experiences during the expedition on the MOSAiC Instagram channel @mosaic_expedition. Here's a look back at the latest issue of Coffee Break.  

Alaska’s beavers are profiting from climate change, and spreading rapidly. In just a few years’ time, they have not only expanded into many tundra regions where they’d never been seen before; they’re also building more and more dams in their new homes, creating a host of new water bodies. This could accelerate the thawing of the permafrost soils, and therefore intensify climate change, as an International American-German research team reports in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

After a month’s absence, on 17 June the German research icebreaker Polarstern rendezvoused with the MOSAiC floe at 82.2 ° North and 8.4 ° East, after having left it on 19 May 2020 to exchange personnel and bunker supplies near Svalbard. Full of energy, the research team for the fourth leg of the expedition, which consists of experts from 19 countries, is looking forward to continuing the one-year-long MOSAiC expedition and its research on the ocean, ice and atmosphere in the Arctic. Earlier this week, their predecessors from Leg 3 returned to…

Humanity cannot limit global warming to 1.5 degrees unless action is taken. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has shown this in its special report from 2018. In addition to reducing emissions to nearly zero, humanity must actively remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere in order to achieve the climate goal. From 1 July, scientists from 14 institutions in six countries including the Alfred Wegener Institute will be examining the opportunities and risks of ocean-based technologies for such negative emissions. The EU is funding the…