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With its geographical location, Canada is an important cooperation partner for Arctic research. This is why Canada's Ambassador John Horgan visited the AWI this week. Together with a delegation from the AWI staff, the ambassador visited the technical centre and signed the guest book. There was also a presentation on the research activities at the AWI and time for discussion. 

For the past 25 years, the Alfred Wegener Institute has operated a long-term observatory in the Arctic deep sea: the HAUSGARTEN. Located between Greenland and Svalbard, it is where researchers investigate natural and climate-change-related changes in a polar, marine ecosystem – from the ocean’s surface to the seafloor, 5,500 metres below. Many of the observatory’s stations are located below the sea ice, while its autonomous systems take measurements year-round, i.e., even when left unmanned.

Researchers around the globe are sounding the alarm: ocean temperatures are the warmest ever recorded. In 2023, the North Sea also experienced dramatic record highs, as readings taken by the Alfred Wegener Institute’s Biological Institute Helgoland indicate. As data from the time series “Helgoland Reede” also reveal: it’s not the first year in which the German Bight experienced marine heatwaves. The high temperatures and extreme weather events are a product of climate change and could have substantial impacts on the ecosystem.

Permafrost soils store large quantities of organic carbon and are often portrayed as a critical tipping element in the Earth system, which, once global warming has reached a certain level, suddenly and globally collapses. Yet this image of a ticking timebomb, one that remains relatively quiet until, at a certain level of warming, it goes off, is a controversial one among the research community. Based on the scientific data currently available, the image is deceptive, as an international team led by the Alfred Wegener Institute has shown in a recently…

Emperor penguins are an endangered species. Scientists are protecting the largest of all penguins by monitoring their numbers precisely and investigating which factors affect their population. A research team led by Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) has now developed a new, reliable method at the Alfred Wegener Institute's Neumayer Station III, among others, that can accurately predict the number of breeding pairs and chicks and thus represents an early warning system for the progression of climate change in the Southern Ocean. The…

To protect the unique Antarctic flora and fauna, Germany is committed to a coherent and representative network of protected areas in the Antarctic. Thanks to a German-American initiative – initiated and developed by the German Environment Agency (UBA) and financed by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV) – it has now been possible to expand this network. Seven islands at the north-eastern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, the so-called “Danger Islands”, were declared a protected area…

A guest on board of Polarstern: Bruno Hönel from the Green Party visited the ship yesterday. The member of the German Bundestag was welcomed by AWI Administrative Director Karsten Wurr. The visit was used for a mutual exchange.

The basis of the marine food web in the Arctic, the phytoplankton, responds to heatwaves much differently than to constantly elevated temperatures. This has been found by the first targeted experiments on the topic, which were recently conducted at the Alfred Wegener Institute’s AWIPEV Station. The phytoplankton’s behaviour primarily depends on the cooling phases after or between heatwaves, as shown in a study just released in the journal Science Advances. 

Over the past three years the collaborative research project APOC, led by the Alfred Wegener Institute, has investigated how climate change and anthropogenic activities and pressure impact the carbon cycle in the North Sea. The final event took place in Berlin, which included an expert discussion with representatives from politics, society and science under the motto “Mud matters”.

Climate change is putting countless marine organisms under pressure. However, jellyfish in the world’s oceans could actually benefit from the rising water temperatures – also and especially in the Arctic Ocean, as researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute have now successfully shown. In computer models, they exposed eight widespread Arctic jellyfish species to rising temperatures, sea ice retreat and other changing environmental conditions. The result: by the second half of this century, all but one of the species in question could substantially…