News

This year's meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) starts next week in Hobart, Australia. Among other things, the Commission sets fishing quotas for the Southern Ocean fisheries, including those for Antarctic krill. The journal Science dedicates an editorial by Bettina Meyer, biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, and her colleague So Kawaguchi from the Australian Antarctic Division to this topic in the current issue.

On 26 September, the operators of Nord Stream reported multiple gas leaks in the underwater pipeline. After consulting with the University of Göteborg and the responsible authorities, and after just three days of preparation, a Swedish and German research group led by Katarina Abrahamson departed on a five-day expedition to the site of the leak on board the research vessel Skagerak. Ellen Damm, Samuel Sellmaier and Volkmar Assmann from the Alfred Wegener Institute were on board to determine how much of the methane released was still in the waters of the…

Studie zeigt: Künftige Emissionen der Permafrostregion sind erheblich und müssen bei den globalen Klimazielen berücksichtigt werden

A major new project will help benchmark biodiversity change in the Arctic Ocean and guide conservation efforts by identifying unique species and assessing their extinction risk. The research led by scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute and the University of East Anglia is now published in PLOS Biology, futher informations can be found in this UAE's press release.

The Alfred Wegener Institute and the MOSAiC research expedition were awarded the Arctic Circle Prize on Saturday, 15 October 2022 in Reykjavik. With the prize, the international organisation Arctic Circle recognises extraordinary contributions to securing a sustainable and prosperous future in the Arctic. This is the third time the prize has been awarded since 2016, previous winners being Ban Ki-moon (then Secretary General of the United Nations) and John Kerry (former US Secretary of State and US Chair of the Arctic Council).

AWI Director Antje Boetius participated in the plenary session Urgent messages from global science leaders at the Arctic Circle Assembly 2022 in Reykjavík yesterday. In the session, she pointed to the need for international action to avoid climate tipping points. The Arctic, she said, is the climate hotspot with global consequences. Scientific observations and assessments of this region are part of the solution. Other panel participants included Roberta Marinelli (NSF) and Dame Jane Francis (BAS). The event was moderated by IASC President Henry Burgess.

As a result of global warming, permafrost regions around the world are thawing now. As they do, climate-relevant greenhouse gases containing carbon (carbon dioxide, methane) and nitrogen (nitrous oxide) can be released from the soil and into the atmosphere. Accordingly, having data on the stored amounts of both elements that are as accurate as possible is essential to making good climate forecasts. Whereas substantial research has been conducted on the carbon reservoirs in permafrost, we still know comparatively little about nitrogen. A team of experts…

The German Arctic Office has compiled an analysis on the Security Policy in the Arctic, including contributions from the German Foreign Office, the German Ministry of Defense, and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. With climate change, valuable resources are becoming accessible in the Arctic, and new shipping routes are opening up. This is rapidly changing the geopolitical situation, and interstate conflicts in the Arctic may arise. The new publication provides an outline as well as an outlook of the relevant topics here.

Over the past 200 years, our planet’s oceans have absorbed more than a quarter of all anthropogenic carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As a result, their acidity has increased by nearly 30 percent their acidity has increased by nearly 30 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In this regard, the water’s pH value isn’t constant; it varies both seasonally and regionally. The lowest values naturally occur in winter. But that could soon change, since they could be shifted to the summer by climate change, as an international team including…

Mesoscale ocean eddies are small, short-lived phenomena that effectively influence ocean properties like temperature, velocity, and salinity.  The effects of eddies are integral to ocean circulation, the uptake of heat and carbon at depth, gas exchange with the atmosphere, and the transport of nutrients. In a new study, a research team led by Alfred Wegener Institute scientists investigated what long-term impact anthropogenic climate change will have on ocean eddies and their far-reaching effects. Using climate model simulations, the study shows how…