News

Today, a delegation from the French University of La Rochelle visits the Alfred Wegener Institute to discuss current and future projects.

In 2019, Charlotte Havermans will form a new four- to five-member research group, which will use cutting-edge technologies to create a jellyfish inventory for the Arctic Ocean. The group will receive financial support from the Helmholtz Association and the Alfred Wegener Institute.

If carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and thereby in the ocean continue to rise, this could favour the mass development of toxic algae, with far-reaching consequences for the pelagic food web. This was discovered during a long-term experiment off the Canary Islands conducted by an international group of scientists with the participation of the Alfred Wegener Institute. The results have now been published in the international journal Nature Climate Change.

On Friday the Argentinian Ambassador S.E. Edgardo Malaroda visited the Alfred Wegener Institute together with the Embassy Secretary Martin Suaya.

An international research team has discovered a 31-km wide meteorite impact crater buried beneath the ice-sheet in northern Greenland. This is the first time that a crater of any size has been found under one of Earth’s continental ice sheets. The research aircraft Polar 6 from the Alfred Wegener Instittue verified the discovery with radar measurements. The research is described in a new study just published in the internationally recognized journal Science Advance.

The Advisory Board of the Otto Schmidt Laboratory (OSL) meets in St. Petersburg, the, i.a. with Dr. Aleksander Makarov (Director AARI), Prof. dr. Antje Boetius (Director AWI) and the new OSL Director Vasiliy Povazhnyi.

„What is the next frontier – Space or Ocean?“ Zu dieser Frage ist AWI-Direktorin Antje Boetius zu einer Diskussion beim Ocean Frontier Institut angetreten.

Due to retarded work on the Polarstern the departure is delayed - On Sunday, 11 November 2018, the research icebreaker Polarstern will leave its homeport of Bremerhaven, bound for Cape Town, South Africa. This will mark the beginning of its Antarctic season, in which oceanographic fieldwork in the Weddell Sea, a resupply mission to the Neumayer Station III, and explorations of the Larsen C ice shelf region and the South Shetland Islands are on the agenda. The ship is expected to return to Bremerhaven in June 2019.

In the course of an extensive Antarctic expedition, researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research recently investigated several lakes beneath Recovery Glacier that had been previously detected by satellite remote sensing. The experts found very few substantial bodies of water, which is a surprising result: up to that point, the scientific community had assumed that overflowing lakes below the East Antarctic Ice Sheet were the reason that ice masses began sliding and forming ice streams to begin with. This…

Warm, moist air masses from the lower latitudes are the main energy source for the Arctic atmosphere in winter; they have a significant influence on soil temperatures and can produce sea-ice melting. Because climate and weather models still have considerable difficulties when it comes to accurately depicting key processes involved in the transformation of these air masses, AWI researchers recently summarised the current state of knowledge and identified remaining gaps; their study has just been released in the journal Nature Geoscience.