News

The Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association (AWI) and the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) received the 21st Century Achievement Award of the Computerworld Honors Program in the category Environment, which is one of the most prestigious awards in information technology.

Research ice breaker Polarstern of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research of the Helmholtz Association puts out to the Arctic on June 12th after three weeks in the dockyards. The expedition of four months length is divided into three stages and leads via the Greenland Sea to Spitsbergen and up to the Fram Strait. The journey through the Northwest Passage up to the East Siberian Sea is planned as the third stage. Two days earlier, on June 10th, the research vessel Heincke leaves the island of Helgoland towards the Orkney Islands.…

The European Project on Ocean Acidification (EPOCA) will be launched on 10 June 2008. Its goal is to document ocean acidification, investigate its impact on biological processes, predict its consequences over the next 100 years, and advise policy-makers on potential thresholds or tipping points that should not be exceeded.

The Antarctic deep sea gets colder, which might stimulate the circulation of the oceanic water masses. This is the first result of the Polarstern expedition of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association that has just ended in Punta Arenas/Chile.

Ice cores are essential for climate research, because they represent the only archive which allows direct measurements of atmospheric composition and greenhouse gas concentrations in the past. Using novel isotopic studies, scientists from the European Project for Ice Coring In Antarctica (EPICA) were now able to identify the most important processes responsible for changes in natural methane concentrations over the transition from the last ice age into our warm period. The study now published in the scientific magazine nature shows that wetland regions…

For the first time, a German has taken part in a Russian drift expedition. Jürgen Graeser, a 49-year-old scientific technician of the Potsdam Research Unit of the Alfred Wegener Institute, has spent seven months on an ice floe and gained observational data from a region, which is normally inaccessible during the Arctic winter.

A new project at the Alfred Wegener Institute dealing with the impact of climate change on marine phytoplankton will be funded by the European Research Council ERC with 1.4 million Euros. With his project "PhytoChange" Dr. Björn Rost was among the 3% of successful applicants for the Independent Investigator Grant and succeeded against more than 9,000 competitors from all over Europe.

The research project EPICA (European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica) is one of this year’s winners of the Descartes Prize for Research awarded by the European Union on the 12th of March in Brussels. The Descartes Prize for Research is endowed by 1.36 million Euro in total and is awarded to up to four European teams each year for outstanding transnational projects in natural sciences and humanities.

Still too much uncertainty in today’s climate models

Scientists present the most important results of polar and climate research at the 23rd International Polar Meeting in Münster from March 10 – 14, 2008.

Press conference on March 10 at 01:00 p.m.