News

Our planet’s strongest ocean current, which circulates around Antarctica, plays a major role in determining the transport of heat, salt and nutrients in the ocean. An international research team led by the Alfred Wegener Institute has now evaluated sediment samples from the Drake Passage. Their findings: during the last interglacial period, the water flowed more rapidly than it does today. This could be a blueprint for the future and have global consequences. For example, the Southern Ocean’s capacity to absorb CO2 could decrease, which would in turn…

In spring 2020, the MOSAiC expedition documented an unparalleled loss of ozone in the Arctic stratosphere. As an evaluation of meteorological data and model-based simulations by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) now indicates, ozone depletion in the Arctic polar vortex could intensify by the end of the century unless global greenhouse gases are rapidly and systematically reduced. In the future, this could also mean more UV radiation exposure in Europe, North America and Asia when parts of the polar vortex…

Many international organizations, including the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) and the Federation of European Microbiological Societies (FEMS), will share their knowledge for the first time at a joint event. AWI Director and marine biologist Antje Boetius will be involved in various program items, such as the live chat on "Sun, global change and microbes" on June 22 starting at 2:00 pm. The event, which will last several days, will be held online and exclusively in English. Further information.

The Black Sea is an extraordinary body of water: below a depth of 150 metres, it contains no free oxygen, and no higher life forms can survive there. At the same time, the inland sea stores a comparatively high volume of organic carbon. A team of researchers led by Dr Gonzalo Gomez-Saez from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and Dr Jutta Niggemann from the University of Oldenburg’s Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment (ICBM) have now put forward a new hypothesis as to why organic…

The European Union will provide 15 million euros from the Horizon 2020 Programme to fund the Arctic PASSION project for the period 2021 to 2025. Under the leadership of the Alfred Wegener Institute, a consortium of 35 partners will promote the integration of international environmental observing systems for the Arctic and improve the tailoring of these systems to the needs of various user groups ranging from local inhabitants to academia through to industry and decision-makers.

While determining the age of a permafrost layer in Siberia, an international team of experts set a new record: at its deepest point, the soil is at least 650,000 years old. Yet the team’s findings, just published in the magazine Quaternary Research, also reveal how sensitive the soil is to disturbances – and how quickly it can be destroyed.

The influx of warmer water masses from the North Atlantic into the European marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean plays a significant role in the marked decrease in sea-ice growth, especially in winter. Sea-ice physicists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), together with researchers from the US and Russia, now present evidence for this in two new studies, which show that heat from the Atlantic has hindered ice growth in the Barents and Kara Seas for years. Furthermore, they demonstrate that the invasion of…

The fight against global warming and for sustainable development can only succeed if, from now on, humankind considers the issues of climate change, biodiversity loss and social justice together, and takes them into account equally in all political decisions – globally, nationally and regionally – as well as their interactions. According to the German co-authors, this is the most important takeaway from a new workshop report on biodiversity and climate change, the first to be jointly prepared by experts from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform…

An eleven-member expedition team is currently underway in the North Atlantic with the Alfred Wegener Institute's research vessel Heincke.

The Alfred Wegener Institute is setting new standards for sustainability in German maritime shipping. On 8 June 2021 the keel for the successor to the research cutter Uthörn will be laid at the Fassmer Shipyard in Berne, Lower Saxony. The 35-metre-long cutter will be the first seagoing vessel in Germany equipped with an environmentally friendly and especially low-emission methanol-fuelled drive system.