News

At an international workshop, nature conservation authorities and organisations, scientists and oyster farmers have founded a European network. Their goal is to reintroduce and restore stocks of the now rare and highly endangered native European oyster.

Researchers from several European institutions found that northern high-latitude cooling played a role in triggering the rapid termination of the African Humid Period 5500 years ago.

On 1 November 2017 Prof Antje Boetius will assume leadership of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). She will succeed Prof Karin Lochte, who has led the Institute for the past ten years.

In November 2017, the German research network on ocean acidification BIOACID (Biological Impacts of Ocean Acidification) reaches its conclusion after eight years of extensive interdisciplinary scientific activity. Experiments and analyses carried out by more than 250 scientists from 20 German institutions clearly indicate that ocean acidification and warming, along with other environmental stressors, impair life in the ocean and compromise important ecosystem services it provides to humankind. A brochure summarises major outcomes of the project for…

Following a five-month journey, the research vessel Polarstern returned to its homeport in Bremerhaven on the evening of Friday, 13 October. During the most recent expedition, the vessel reached the 79 North Glacier in Northeast Greenland, where the researchers on board investigated how the ocean temperature, which has been rising over the past twenty years, has affected the glacier’s mass.

The 1st of October 2017 marks the ten-year anniversary since the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) research aircraft Polar 5 began service. In that time, the Basler BT-67 has flown more than 1.3 million kilometres to fulfil essential scientific and logistical duties. In the course of 48 measuring campaigns, predominantly for atmospheric research and geophysics purposes, the airplane has landed on the Arctic sea ice near the North Pole, and at the South Pole.

The founding of the AWI Potsdam 25 years ago represented the successful reunification of German polar research. In honour of this occasion, today representatives of the scientific community and politics will look back on a quarter century of polar research at the Alfred Wegner Institute’s Potsdam facilities – including Brandenburg’s Minister for Science, Research and Culture, Dr Martina Münch, and Karl-Eugen Huthmacher from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. They will also inaugurate a new annex on the Telegrafenberg. 

Around the globe, the pollution of rivers, lakes and seas with plastic litter is on the rise. A new project jointly coordinated by the University of Bayreuth and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) is the first to approach the problem from a holistic perspective. In the model region Weser – Wadden Sea National Park the participating researchers will use e.g. empirical and model-assisted analyses to discover how minute plastic particles (microplastics) make their way from land to sea, which input and…

This September, the extent of Arctic sea ice shrank to roughly 4.7 million square kilometres, as was determined by researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute, the University of Bremen and Universität Hamburg. Though slightly larger than last year, the minimum sea ice extent 2017 is average for the past ten years and far below the numbers from 1979 to 2006. The Northeast Passage was traversable for ships without the need for icebreakers.

Over the next five years, nine research centres of the Helmholtz Association will collaborate to create a flexible, mobile measuring system for Earth observation: MOSES – Modular Observation Solutions for Earth Systems. Researchers will use this system to investigate how short-term dynamic events such as heatwaves and heavy rainfall are linked to the long-term development of Earth and environmental systems. MOSES is being coordinated at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig.