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Geologists and geophysicists of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), discovered traces of large ice sheets from the Pleistocene on a seamount off the north-eastern coast of Russia. These marks confirm for the first time that within the past 800,000 years in the course of ice ages, ice sheets more than a kilometre thick also formed in the Arctic Ocean. The climate history for this part of the Arctic now needs to be rewritten, report the AWI scientists jointly with their South Korean colleagues in the title…

Recent warming of the Greenland Sea Deep Water is about ten times higher than warming rates estimated for the global ocean. Scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research recently published these findings in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. For their study, they analysed temperature data from 1950 to 2010 in the abyssal Greenland Sea, which is an ocean area located just to the south of the Arctic Ocean.

The annual minimum sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean in September is on average around 5.1 million square kilometres this year, and is thus some 50 percent above the previous negative record of 3.4 million square kilometres recorded in 2012. “This figure does not signal a reversal in the trend, however”, is the joint conclusion drawn by sea ice physicist Marcel Nicolaus from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), and Lars Kaleschke from the University of Hamburg, KlimaCampus (Climate Campus).

Biologists and physicists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, found out that not all of the Southern Hemisphere humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) migrate towards the equator at the end of the Antarctic summer. Part of the population remains in Antarctic waters throughout the entire winter. The scientists report this in a current issue of scientific journal PLOS ONE. This surprising discovery based on underwater recordings from the Antarctic acoustic observatory PALAOA. It is located near the research…

Ocean acidification could change the ecosystems of our seas even by the end of this century. Biologists at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), have therefore assessed the extent of this ominous change for the first time. In a new study they compiled and analysed all available data on the reaction of marine animals to ocean acidification. The scientists found that whilst the majority of animal species investigated are affected by ocean acidification, the respective impacts are very specific. The…

Physicists at the Alfred Wegener Institute, the Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, successfully tested a thermal imaging system aboard the research vessel Polarstern. The system automatically detects large whales by their spouts, day or night from distances up to five kilometres. As the scientists report in a recent study published in the journal PLOS ONE, the system detected significantly more whales than researchers using binoculars to spot the animals. The thermal imaging camera and accompanying analysis software is an effective tool for…

21 metres long, 1.30 metre draught, a maximum speed of ten knots and full of the most up-to-date technology: on 13 August 2013 the research ship MYA II will be handed over to science at a ceremony in List on Sylt. Prof. Dr. Waltraud Wende, the Schleswig-Holstein Minister for Education and Research, is going to be present at the event, as well as representatives of the Federal Ministry for Education and Research. Ten percent of the 4.5 million euro development and construction costs for the MYA II were met by the State of Schleswig-Holstein, and 90…

The breakup and collapse of the Larsen A ice shelf in the western Weddell Sea in 1995 has resulted in fundamental changes to life on the sea bed in less than two decades. As reported by biologists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in the cover story of the current issue of the scientific journal Current Biology, Antarctic glass sponges have been the prime beneficiaries of the disappearance of the ice shelf. To the surprise of the scientists, the density of these archaic filter-feeders has increased…

Yesterday (8 July 2013) a huge area of the ice shelf broke away from the Pine Island glacier, the longest and fastest flowing glacier in the Antarctic, and is now floating in the Amundsen Sea in the form of a very large iceberg. Scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association have been following this natural spectacle via the earth observation satellites TerraSAR-X from the German Space Agency (DLR) and have documented it in many individual images. The data is intended to help solve the physical…

AWI-scientist Prof. Dr. Hans-Otto Pörtner and his colleague Dr. Sam Dupont (University of Gothenborg, Kristineberg, Sweden) publish in the current issue of the journal nature the article: “Get ready for ocean acidification“. They summarize the current status of knowledge and demonstrate needs for action. Their appeal: more interdisciplinary research has appeared necessary.