News

A guest on board of Polarstern: Bruno Hönel from the Green Party visited the ship yesterday. The member of the German Bundestag was welcomed by AWI Administrative Director Karsten Wurr. The visit was used for a mutual exchange.

The basis of the marine food web in the Arctic, the phytoplankton, responds to heatwaves much differently than to constantly elevated temperatures. This has been found by the first targeted experiments on the topic, which were recently conducted at the Alfred Wegener Institute’s AWIPEV Station. The phytoplankton’s behaviour primarily depends on the cooling phases after or between heatwaves, as shown in a study just released in the journal Science Advances. 

Over the past three years the collaborative research project APOC, led by the Alfred Wegener Institute, has investigated how climate change and anthropogenic activities and pressure impact the carbon cycle in the North Sea. The final event took place in Berlin, which included an expert discussion with representatives from politics, society and science under the motto “Mud matters”.

Climate change is putting countless marine organisms under pressure. However, jellyfish in the world’s oceans could actually benefit from the rising water temperatures – also and especially in the Arctic Ocean, as researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute have now successfully shown. In computer models, they exposed eight widespread Arctic jellyfish species to rising temperatures, sea ice retreat and other changing environmental conditions. The result: by the second half of this century, all but one of the species in question could substantially…

After more than six months, the research icebreaker Polarstern is returning to its home port of Bremerhaven after a successful Antarctic season. The expeditions to the southern hemisphere and the transit there focussed on the oceanography and geology of East Antarctica as well as student training. Because of this special study area for the Polarstern, there was a change of personnel in Hobart, which was the first port call in Australia in her more than 40-year history.

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology with the participation of the Alfred Wegener Institute have discovered a new partnership between a marine diatom and a bacterium that can account for a large share of nitrogen fixation in vast regions of the ocean. The newly-discovered bacterial symbiont is closely related to the nitrogen-fixing Rhizobia which live in partnership with many crop plants and may open up new avenues to engineer nitrogen-fixing plants. This discovery, now described in the scientific journal Nature, could open up…

Over the past two days, Berlin hosted the Arctic Circle Forum. More than 100 speakers, including Arctic researchers, policy makers and indigenous representatives, took part in over 20 sessions. In addition to AWI Director Antje Boetius, participants included Federal Research Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger, Federal Environment Minister Steffi Lemke, Icelandic Research Minister Áslaug Arna Sigurbjörnsdóttir and H.S.H. Prince Albert II of Monaco. 

Scientific research - not only confined to dedicated research vessels but also from non-scientific vessels and marine infrastructures. This is one of the ideas promoted by the Helmholtz Innovation Platform “Shaping an Ocean Of Possibilities” (SOOP). SOOP aims to develop new technologies and structures for ocean observation and has recently initiated a cooperation with HX Hurtigruten Expeditions. During cruise voyages to remote regions, ocean data will be collected for scientific purposes. The first expedition with SOOP technology on board now started in…

Australia, New Zealand, Fiji: Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock is traveling to the key region of the Indo-Pacific. AWI scientist Markus Rex is part of the delegation trip from May 1 to 7. At a meeting with New Zealand's Foreign Minister Winston Peters, Markus Rex, representing the AWI, signed a Memorandum of Arrangement (MoA) with New Zealand's Antarctic Authority on cooperation in the Antarctic. The core of the Antarctic Treaty System is international cooperation in science. Further information.

During the annual Arctic Science Summit Week (ASSW) in Scotland, Dirk Mengedoht, Logistics Coordinator at the AWI for land expeditions and stations in the Arctic, was elected as the new Chairman of the Forum of Arctic Research Operators (FARO). During his three-year term of office, Dirk Mengedoht intends to focus primarily on the transparency and networking of various committees and initiatives with FARO in order to better combine parallel approaches, e.g. with regard to safety in the field.