News

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.

The journey of 'MS Wissenschaft', which starts today in Berlin, will last four and a half months. Until October 9, the exhibition ship will be travelling through 34 cities in Germany. On the route, the ship stops at the AWI sites Bremerhaven and Potsdam.

On 11 May 2018, a high-level symposium was held in Kiel in memory of Eugen Seibold, at which AWI Director Prof. Antje Boetius gave a keynote speech. Marine geologist Seibold has trained and shaped generations of marine researchers, and would have turned 100 this year. Following the symposium, a new research vessel was christened ‘Eugen Seibold’.

When ocean temperatures change, the natural variability of the oxygen supply and the associated biogeochemical cycles don’t respond in a lineal manner. Instead, circa 6,000 years ago a tipping point was reached relatively suddenly. This was the key finding of a study by group of researchers led by geologists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), which has now been published in the journal PNAS.

Experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute and the Universities of Oldenburg and Potsdam, Germany have confirmed the existence of a new cryptic amphipod species in the North Sea. For the first time for the description of a new species, they used a level of mitogenomic information, which was normally applied in other areas of genetics. The discovery of Epimeria frankei was now published in the journal Scientific Reports. In the future, this level of molecular information could revolutionise biodiversity research.