News

"Climate catastrophe, environmental pollution, and 'saving the oceans' are all interrelated issues. They concern, or should concern, everyone on this planet." - with these words, the selection committee explained its choice of recipient for the 2019 LeibnizRingHannover Award: AWI Director Prof Antje Boetius.

In front of about 120 people, Antje Boetius talked about the influence of global warming on the polar regions in "Klimahaus Bremerhaven 8° Ost". She reported on expeditions and the direct consequences of accelerated climate change.

On Thursday, 18 April 2019 an official groundbreaking ceremony was held for a new Technical Centre for the development of innovative maritime technologies in Klußmannstraße, Bremerhaven. Representatives of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Federal State of Bremen, and the City of Bremerhaven celebrated this milestone together with the Directorate and staff of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research.

Based on global forecasts, storm events accompanied by heavy rainfall and flooding will occur 10 to 20 percent more frequently by the end of this century. Moreover, they and extreme low-water phases will produce a tremendous amount of damage, not to mention both socio-economic and ecological impacts. In order to better understand those impacts, on 16 and 17 April 2019 three research ships in the Helmholtz programme MOSES will undertake a joint research cruise from the Elbe estuary to Helgoland. 

On March 17, 2002, the German-US satellite duo GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) were launched to map the global gravitational field with unprecedented precision. After all, the mission lasted a good 15 years - more than three times as long as expected. When the two satellites burnt up in the Earth's atmosphere at the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018, respectively, they had recorded the Earth's gravitational field and its changes over time in more than 160 months.

Where the Earth’s plates meet, there is evidence of their motion. An expedition of the Research Vessel Polarstern will explore this activity in the Southern Ocean in detail. The major focus of the expedition led by scientists from MARUM is to examine hot vents and cold seeps. This will be the first deployment of the remotely operated vehicle MARUM-QUEST in the Antarctic region. The start of the expedition is scheduled for 13 April 2019.

In the context of a major European Union project, experts from 14 institutions in ten European countries have spent three years combing the Antarctic ice, looking for the ideal site to investigate the climate history of the past 1.5 million years. Today, the consortium Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice (BE-OI), led by Olaf Eisen from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven, presented its findings at the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna.

The dramatic loss of ice in the Arctic is influencing sea-ice transport across the Arctic Ocean. As experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research report in a new study, today only 20 percent of the sea ice that forms in the shallow Russian marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean actually reaches the Central Arctic, where it joins the Transpolar Drift; the remaining 80 percent of the young ice melts before it has a chance to leave its ‘nursery’. Before 2000, that number was only 50 percent. According to the…

The symposium in Lisbon was attended by high-ranking representatives of the Portuguese funding organisation and the University of Lisbon. Representatives from all over Europe and the European Commission were also present. AWI Director Antje Boetius gave the keynote speech.

There is a wide variety of animals living on the Arctic seabed. Attached to rocks, they feed by removing nutrients from the water using filters or tentacles. But it can take decades for these colonies to become established, and they probably don’t achieve their natural diversity until much later. These are the findings of a unique 18-year study by researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), which has now been published in the scientific journal “Limnology and Oceanography”.