News

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has now announced the Lead Authors for its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), and experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) fulfil prominent roles in this regard: Prof. Hans-Otto Pörtner, an ecophysiologist at the AWI, has been Co-Chair (with Prof. Debra Roberts (South Africa) of the IPCC’s Working Group II since 2016. In addition, Dr Björn Rost and Prof. Dieter Piepenburg of the AWI have now agreed to serve as Lead Authors for individual chapters of…

On the seafloor of the shallow coastal regions north of Siberia, microorganisms produce methane when they break down plant remains. If this greenhouse gas finds its way into the water, it can also become trapped in the sea ice that forms in these coastal waters. As a result, the gas can be transported thousands of kilometres across the Arctic Ocean and released in a completely different region months later. This phenomenon is the subject of an article by researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, published in the current issue of the online journal…

The world’s second-largest ice shelf was the destination for a Polarstern expedition that ended in Punta Arenas, Chile on 14th March 2018. Oceanographers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, together with German and international colleagues, have collected important data along the entire glacier front of the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf, which will help them investigate the melting of the Antarctic Ice Sheet in an important region in the context of global sea-level rise from a multi-disciplinary perspective.

On 15 March, the AWI research aeroplane Polar 5 will depart for Greenland. Concentrating on the furthest northeast region of the island, an international team of researchers will spend the next four weeks studying how the Arctic is changing. In the course of the PAMARCMiP campaign they will measure the sea ice and the atmosphere between Greenland and Svalbard – on the ground, using a tethered balloon, and from the air. Their primary target: carbon particles.

This week 160 researchers, research leaders, representatives from the Norwegian Research Council, stakeholders, industry, management and international cooperation partners were gathered in Tromsø. Amonst them AWI director Prof Antje Boetius and Arcitc scientist Dr Michael Karcher, both members of the project's Advisory Board. 

The Arctic sea ice continues to dwindle: Since the 1970s, when satellites first began monitoring the white sheet covering the Arctic Ocean, its February extent was never as small as it was this year. The reason: warm air intrusions, which are not only hitting the Arctic more frequently, but are also intensifying and reaching farther north.

A team led by geochemist Dr. Katharina Pahnke from Oldenburg has discovered important evidence that the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at the end of the last ice age was triggered by changes in the Antarctic Ocean. The researchers from the University of Oldenburg's Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment (ICBM), the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) were able to demonstrate that the deep South Pacific was strongly…

A team of scientists, led by British Antarctic Survey (BAS), heads to Antarctica to investigate a mysterious marine ecosystem that’s been hidden beneath an Antarctic ice shelf for up to 120,000 years.

Making climate research accessible – it was with this goal in mind that the Alfred Wegener Institute released the magazine “Tracking Changes”. In articles, interviews and infographics, readers will come to realise why pursuing climate research in the polar regions is so vital. Further, the engaging and highly informative read will make them ideally prepared for the next time they find themselves in a discussion about climate change.

Storing carbon dioxide (CO2) deep below the seabed is one way to counteract the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. But what happens if such storage sites begin to leak and CO2 escapes through the seafloor? Answers to this question have now been provided by a study dealing with the effects of CO2 emissions on the inhabitants of sandy seabed areas.