News

The leading international Arctic research organisations have set common scientific objectives for the coming decade. The indigenous peoples of the Arctic were also involved in this process. Under the auspices of the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC), which is based at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, they are about to submit a report that sets out the path for a jointly conceived and solution-oriented research agenda on the sustainable development of the Arctic and beyond.

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Unusual weather development in the Arctic leads to ozone depletion. According to the researchers of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, in the past weeks an extreme cold spell in the Arctic stratosphere has created conditions that might cause severe ozone depletion over the Arctic in March – if the next few weeks will not bring a significant warming.

A future warming of the Southern Ocean caused by rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere may severely disrupt the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The result would be a rise in the global sea level by several metres. A collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may have occurred during the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago, a period when the polar surface temperature was around two degrees Celsius higher than today. This is the result of a series of model simulations which the researchers of the Alfred Wegener Institute,…

Sea ice physicists of the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) have developed a new method that allows them for the first time to efficiently determine the distribution and thickness of what researchers call a sub-ice platelet layer. This several metre thick layer of delicate ice crystals is predominantly found beneath coastal Antarctic sea ice, and at present knowledge about its spatial distribution is very limited. This phenomenon, which is also known as platelet ice, is of central importance in the coastal regions of the Antarctic, influencing sea ice…

The Helmholtz Climate Initiative REKLIM ("Regionale Klimaänderungen"/Regional Climcate Change), coordinated by the Alfred Wegener Institute, is one of 190 featured exhibitors at the 5th "Woche der Umwelt" (Week of the Environment) - an environmental exhibition of the Federal President and the German Federal Environmental Foundation (DBU). The event will take place on 7 and 8 June 2016 in Berlin's Schloss Bellevue and presents the topic "Environmental Protection" with its associated economic and social chances to thousands of invited guests.

According to estimates, Alaska's thawing permafrost soils cost the USA several 100 million dollars every decade – primarily because airports, roads, pipelines and settlements require relocation as a result of sinking ground and eroding river banks. An international team of researchers has now measured riverbank erosion rates, which exceed all previous records, along the Itkillik River in Alaska's north. In a stretch of land where the ground contains a particularly large quantity of ice the Itkillik River eats into the river bank at 19 metres per year,…

Since January 2014 two snow depth buoys deliver continuously information about the snow depth on Antarctic sea ice. During this time they traveled 5200 kilometres and each took more than 17500 measurements along the route.

Today the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the Institute for Environmental Physics of the University Bremen officially open their Palau Atmospheric Observatory at the Campus of the Palau Community College (PCC). The new observatory is part of the European climate research project StratoClim, a consortium of 28 European research organisations led by AWI, and is operated in close collaboration with the PCC.

The construction work on the new annexe of the AWI Potsdam (Telegrafenberg) is right on schedule. AWI's construction project manager Elke Meißner announced this good news at the official topping-out ceremony in Potsdam yesterday.