News

A few days ago, the captain and the head of the current Polarstern expedition jointly decided to abandon their efforts to reach the Larsen C Ice Shelf. Since dense sea ice and ice ridges blocked the planned route, the ship has now set course for alternative research sites further to the north.

On the evening of 6 March 2019, His Majesty King Willem-Alexander and Her Majesty Queen Máxima of the Netherlands will visit the Alfred Wegener Institute as part of their tour of the State of Bremen. Dutch and German researchers will report to the royal couple on their collaborations regarding climate change, biodiversity and nature conservation, sign a joint declaration, and subsequently gather for a festive dinner.

The bottom of the Baltic Sea is home to large quantities of sunken munitions, a legacy of the Second World War – and often very close to shore. Should we simply leave them where they are and accept the risk of their slowly releasing toxic substances, or should we instead remove them, and run the risk of their falling apart – or even exploding? Administrators and politicians face these questions when e.g. there are plans for building a new wind park, or laying an underwater cable. In the course of the international project DAIMON, researchers prepared…

At the invitation of Senator of Science Eva Quante-Brandt, and as part of her tour of the Federal States, today (Thursday, 7 February 2019) Federal Minister of Education and Research Anja Karliczek visited the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven.

Cracks in the floating ice tongue of Petermann Glacier in the far northwest reaches of Greenland indicate the pending loss of another large iceberg. As glaciologists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) report in a new study, the glacier’s flow rate has increased by an average of 10 percent since the calving event in 2012, during which time new cracks have also formed – a quite natural process. However, the experts’ model simulations also show that, if these ice masses truly break off, Petermann…

Dr Peter Bauer, Deputy Director of the Research Department of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in the UK, has been awarded the Helmholtz International Fellow Award 2018.

An international team of scientists heads to Antarctica this week to investigate a mysterious marine ecosystem that’s been hidden beneath an Antarctic ice shelf for up to 120,000 years.

Over the next few months, geophysicists and geologists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research will gain unprecedented insights into the climatic history of the Antarctic Ice Sheet as part of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP). The experts will take part in three Antarctic expeditions on board the IODP drilling ship “JOIDES Resolution”, and will lead two of the three legs. By collecting the drilled cores, the researchers hope to find evidence of how the ice masses of the Antarctic have reacted to…

The Antarctic is a frigid continent south of the Antarctic Circle, where researchers are the only inhabitants. Despite the hostile conditions, here the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) operates a research station where researchers live and work year round. Since 2009 the Neumayer Station III, located on the Ekström Ice Shelf on the eastern coast of the Weddell Sea, has served as the primary base of operations for German Antarctic research activities. The station crew, together with a delegation from the…

Global warming is leaving more and more apparent scars in the world’s permafrost regions. As the new global comparative study conducted by the international permafrost network GTN-P shows, in all regions with permafrost soils the temperature of the frozen ground at a depth of more than 10 metres rose by an average of 0.3 degrees Celsius between 2007 and 2016 – in the Arctic and Antarctic, as well as the high mountain ranges of Europe and Central Asia. The effect was most pronounced in Siberia, where the temperature of the frozen soil rose by nearly 1…