News

Scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), have found between Greenland and Spitsbergen the scours left behind on the sea bed by gigantic icebergs. The five lineaments, at a depth of 1,200 metres, are the lowest-lying iceberg scours yet to be found on the Arctic sea floor. This finding provides new understanding of the dynamics of the Ice Age and the extent of the Arctic ice sheet thousands of years ago. In addition, the researchers could draw conclusions about the export of fresh water from the…

This spring Reederei F. Laeisz G.m.b.H. received the contract award for consulting services concerning design and construction of a future German research icebreaker. Today, Tuesday, 22 July 2014, representatives of the shipping company and the Alfred Wegener Institute additionally signed a contract for ship management in Bremerhaven.

Since the last glacial period so-called thermokarst lakes in Arctic permafrost areas have sequestered more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than they ever previously emitted during their formation. An international team of scientists presents this surprising research result today in an online publication by the journal Nature. The researchers had examined up to 10,000-year-old soil deposits from northern Siberian lakes and calculated for the first time the total carbon balance for several hundred thousand bodies of water.

The simpler a marine organism is structured, the better it is suited for survival during climate change. Scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, discovered this in a new meta-study, which appears today in the research journal Global Change Biology. For the first time biologists studied the relationship between the complexity of life forms and the ultimate limits of their adaptation to a warmer climate. While unicellular bacteria and archaea are able to live even in hot, oxygen-deficient water, marine…

Gentoo penguins glide over the water almost like dancers. Just beneath them filigree jellyfish float through rays of light and manta rays glide past majestically. The viperfish appears eerily and with enormous fangs in the depths. Nature photographer Solvin Zankl from Kiel (Germany) has photographed them all. For years he has been travelling around the world, taking a closer look at islands, coasts and the open sea to document the dwellers of the oceans in all their splendour.

As of today, the names of two previously unknown underwater mountains will appear on the nautical charts of the South Atlantic and the Weddell Sea: “Madiba Seamount” and “Nachtigaller Shoal”. In selecting the names at its conference in Monaco this year, the Sub-Committee on Undersea Feature Names (SCUFN) followed the proposals of two scientists at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research. They had discovered the mountains on Polarstern expeditions to Antarctica last year. The designation signifies official exploration…

On Friday evening, June 6, 2014, RV Polarstern will set sail for the Arctic Ocean. 52 scientific expedition participants, dispatched by institutions in five countries, and a crew of 43 are going to start for the four-weeks expedition. The destination is the Fram Strait, in the waters between Greenland and Spitsbergen. This strait forms the only deep gateway between the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic. The researchers will be examining longer-term physical, oceanographic, chemical and biological changes, reaching from the atmosphere to the depths of…

At the end of the last glacial period, the Antarctic Ice Sheet lost a large amount of ice within a very short timespan. This led to a rapid global sea level rise of several metres. An international research team came to this conclusion in a study published in the latest edition of the scientific journal Nature. The joint project of geologists and climate scientists has shown that an unstable Antarctic ice sheet could precipitously change the climate of the Southern Hemisphere. At the same time it provides important evidence of how current climate change…

An international team of researchers has, for the first time ever, conducted a wide-ranging survey of litter in European waters and has found traces of waste in every region – from coastal areas all the way down to deep canyons. The results of this survey appeared on May 1 in PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed, online journal. How this litter affects marine life and, ultimately, human beings, is largely unknown to date.

After one and a half years in the Antarctic the research vessel Polarstern is expected back in its home port on 13 April. Apart from the crew and scientists on board, there are lots of data, samples and animals from the Southern Ocean that will soon be examined more closely in the laboratories of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). They stem from the area of the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in the very south of the Weddell Sea, where scientists conducted research on sea ice, oceanic currents and the biocoenoses…