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AWI director Antje Boetius currently participates as an ocean expert in the Action Platform for Sustainable Ocean Business at the United Nations in New York.

After a decade of preparations, it’s finally time: this evening at 8:30 p.m. the German icebreaker Polarstern will depart from the Norwegian port of Tromsø. Escorted by the Russian icebreaker Akademik Fedorov, she will set sail for the Central Arctic. On board researchers will investigate a region that is virtually inaccessible in winter, and which is crucial for the global climate. They will gather urgently needed data on the interactions between the atmosphere, ocean and sea ice, as well as on the ecosystem. Thanks to the collaboration between…

How do humans affect forest fires? And what can we learn from forest fires in the past for the future of forestry? An international team of researchers led by Elisabeth Dietze, formerly at the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ in Potsdam and now at the Alfred Wegener Institute - Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, now provides new answers to these questions. The research team has shown for a region in north-eastern Poland that forest fires increasingly occurred there after the end of the 18th century with the change to organised…

An expedition of superlatives: MOSAiC poses a big challenge to all international scientists involved: The drift of Polarstern will be determined by nature and can only be estimated so far in advance. To allow everyone interested to join this exciting expedition live, the MOSAiC web application will launch on the 20th of September, including all features.

The sea-ice extent in the Arctic is nearing its annual minimum at the end of the melt season in September. Only circa 3.9 million square kilometres of the Arctic Ocean are covered by sea ice any more, according to researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute and the University of Bremen. This is only the second time that the annual minimum has dropped below four million square kilometres since satellite measurements began in 1979.

Antje Boetius gives a lecture on 13.9.19, from 18:45 on the topic "Science of Arctic Change - What the North Pole has got to do with us" at the Institut français Bremen. All interested are welcome. Organizer is the Cosmopolitan Ladies Club Bremen.

The National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) organize the conference series "Science for Future".

Researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute now, for the first time, feed the results from their global models directly into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change database. The data is particularly interesting because the underlying model, developed at the AWI, depicts the sea ice and the oceans with far greater definition than conventional methods. The results are used by climate scientists and stakeholders around the globe to determine the effects of climate change on humans and the environment.

20 years ago, scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) laid the “foundation stone” for a unique long-term observatory in the partly ice-covered Fram Strait between Greenland and Svalbard, which they call their HAUSGARTEN. The deep-sea observatory is the first, and still the only one of its kind for year-round physical, chemical and biological observations in a polar region. Here researchers investigate how a polar marine ecosystem alters in a period of global change. 

The tiny organisms cling to oil droplets and perform a great feat: As a single organism, they may produce methane from oil by a process called alkane disproportionation. Previously this was only known from symbioses between bacteria and archaea. Scientists from Joint Re­search Group for Deep-Sea Eco­logy and Tech­no­logy of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (MPI), have now found cells of this microbe called  Methanoliparia in oil reservoirs worldwide.