News

An eleven-member expedition team is currently underway in the North Atlantic with the Alfred Wegener Institute's research vessel Heincke.

The Alfred Wegener Institute is setting new standards for sustainability in German maritime shipping. On 8 June 2021 the keel for the successor to the research cutter Uthörn will be laid at the Fassmer Shipyard in Berne, Lower Saxony. The 35-metre-long cutter will be the first seagoing vessel in Germany equipped with an environmentally friendly and especially low-emission methanol-fuelled drive system.

A process-based model reveals that how much carbon peatlands may lose—or accumulate—in the future varies from place to place.

An international research team has now determined that the preindustrial atmosphere contained far more aerosols from fires and slash-and-burn agriculture than indicated by previous studies. Since soot particles have a cooling effect on the Earth, some climate models may now need to be adjusted.

Experts at the Alfred Wegener Institute have, for the first time, experimentally measured the release of iron from the fecal pellets of krill and salps under natural conditions and tested its bioavailability using a natural community of microalgae in the Southern Ocean. In comparison to the fecal pellets of krill, Antarctic phytoplankton can more easily take up the micronutrient iron from those produced by salps. Observations made over the past 20 years show that, as a result of climate change, Antarctic krill are increasingly being supplanted by salps…

The 17th International Architecture Exhibition opened in Venice last weekend. "How will we live together?" is the motto. Also included is a holistic work about Antarctica, in which several AWI scientists participated. "Antarctic Resolution" takes a multidisciplinary look at the continent's unique geography, its unparalleled scientific potential, its contemporary geopolitical significance, its experimental governance system and its extreme inhabitant model. (Copyright Photo: UNLESS. Photo by DSL Studio)

During the era of commercial whaling, fin whales were hunted so intensively that only a small percentage of the population in the Southern Hemisphere survived, and even today, marine biologists know little about the life of the world’s second-largest whale. That makes the findings of researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the Johann Heinrich von Thünen Institute for Sea Fisheries, which show that a large number of the baleen whales regularly frequent the krill-rich waters surrounding…

On Whit Monday, 24 May 2021, the Polarstern will set sail for the Arctic. In Fram Strait, between Greenland and Svalbard, more than 50 participating scientists will resume the long-term observations that began at the AWI HAUSGARTEN more than 20 years ago. Here they will investigate the effects of environmental changes on the Arctic’s deep-sea ecosystem.

Normally, mountain forests are among the most diverse habitats in alpine regions. Yet, as a team from the Alfred Wegener Institute discovered in the Tibetan Plateau, the higher, treeless areas are home to far more species. Their findings, which were just published in the journal Nature Communications, can help to predict how the biodiversity of alpine regions will decline in response to global warming – when the mountain forests spread to higher elevations.

AMAP - The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program has published a report on the state of the Arctic on the Arctic Council Minsterial. AWI scientists Melanie Bergmann, Gunnar Spreen, Sebastian Primpke and Ilka Peeken have made significant contributions to the development AMAP guidelines and a plan for monitoring microplastics and litter in the Arctic, to support the Arctic Council Marine Litter Regional Action Plan. The most important messages of the report are summarized in a video.