News

“Citizen Science” gives interested citizens the chance to actively engage in scientific research. A citizen-science project conducted by AWI in the Arctic now shows just how successful this can be. In the course of five years, citizens who went on sailing cruises to the Arctic surveyed and collected plastic debris that had washed up on the shores of Svalbard. This has now been analysed by the Alfred Wegener Institute. According to the findings, one third of the plastic debris which still bore imprints or labels allowing an analysis of their origin came…

A massive ecological change is underway in the Arctic. Due to rising water temperatures, many Arctic fish species are retreating farther and farther north, while species from more temperate latitudes are increasingly being sighted off the coasts of Greenland and Svalbard. Experts from Kiel University, the University of Tromsø, and the Alfred Wegener Institute have now analysed scientific publications on the ecological impacts of climate change in Arctic seas released in the past ten years. Their findings: the shifting habitats have affected entire biotic…

Since late summer last year, 50 sound clips from the Arctic and Antarctic seas have been made available for sound artists and musicians from all over the world to creatively reinterpret. On Monday, the resulting compositions will be published at citiesandmemory.com/polar-sounds. As part of the Polar Sounds project, the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity at the University of Oldenburg (HIFMB) and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) are collaborating with one of the world’s largest sound…

The second drilling campaign of Beyond EPICA - Oldest Ice has been successfully completed. The international research project is funded by the European Commission with 11 million euros and coordinated by the Institute of Polar Sciences of the CNR. It aims to obtain data on the evolution of temperatures, the composition of the atmosphere and the carbon cycle, by going back in time 1.5 million years through analyzing an ice core extracted from the depths of the Antarctic ice sheet. The complex deep ice drilling system was installed quickly, kicking off…

From January 30 to February 2, the Arctic Frontiers Conference „Moving North“ will be held in Tromsø, Norway. With participants from the science, indigenous community, business and more, the most pressing issues facing the Arctic will be discussed. On February 2, AWI Director Antje Boetius will participate as a speaker in the session "Science - Moving the Real World," which will focus on the importance of knowledge-based decision making, in general and in the Arctic in particular. More information

Researchers from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of Hamburg have come to Bremerhaven to process and analyze sea ice cores from the MOSAiC expedition at AWI. For this work, the freezer laboratory container of the MOSAiC expedition, which is normally only used at sea, has been set up in front of Building E. The researchers' goal is to better understand the growth history of sea ice and its optical properties. More information

AWI Director Antje Boetius will receive the Ernst Ludwig Winnacker Award from the Bayer Foundation on January 30. The award recognizes scientists who contribute to the dialogue between science and society. The award ceremony will be followed by a panel discussion on the topic of "Science and society - a broken relationship?". In addition to Boetius, the panel will include Jeanne Rubner from the TU Munich and Patrick Cramer from the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences.

Sea ice plays a central part in the Earth system: it cools our planet, shapes ocean currents, and offers a habitat for countless species. Yet climate change is causing sea ice in the polar regions to increasingly dwindle. In the Antarctic, sea-ice retreat is currently so intense that we could see a new record minimum in the second half of February 2023. The SEA ICE PORTAL offers essential information on this and many other developments. From today, the joint project of the Alfred Wegener Institute, the Helmholtz Climate Initiative REKLIM, and the…

A temperature reconstruction from ice cores of the past 1,000 years reveals that today’s warming in central-north Greenland is surprisingly pronounced. The most recent decade surveyed in a study, the years 2001 to 2011, was the warmest in the past 1,000 years, and the region is now 1.5 °C warmer than during the 20th century, as researchers led by the Alfred Wegener Institute just report in the journal Nature. Using a set of ice cores unprecedented in length and quality, they reconstructed past temperatures in central-north Greenland and melting rates of…

Yesterday, German Federal Research Minister Stark-Watzinger visited the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). She was joined by researchers from the German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ) and the AWI research unit in Potsdam to talk to scientists about the need for CO2-neutral energy sources. The AWI was represented by Ulrike Herzschuh, Julia Boike and the head of the research unit Bernhard Diekmann.