consequence of the ongoing summer seaice decrease? These are the questions moving our biologists and therefore they study flora and fauna in the seaice, the water and at the sea floor. Hence our transects through
SeaIce The Arctic seaice 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
The alga Melosira arctica, which grows under Arctic seaice, contains ten times as many microplastic particles as the surrounding seawater. This concentration at the base of the food web poses a threat [...] creatures that feed on the algae at the sea surface. Clumps of dead algae also transport the plastic with its pollutants particularly quickly into the deep sea - and can thus explain the high microplastic
unusual for an expedition to the southern Weddell Sea to do the first station already one week after departure. The test station, still away from seaice, turns out to be a tough exercise, since parts of
br>New research from a large international community of scientists predicts that sea level rise from the melting of ice could be halved this century if we meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting warming
ed geo-engineering approach, both sea-ice retreat and global warming could be slowed by using millions of wind-powered pumps, drifting in the seaice, to promote ice formation during the Arctic winter [...] the journal Earth’s Future. Their verdict is sobering: though the approach could potentially put off ice-free Arctic summers for a few more decades, beyond the Arctic the massive campaign wouldn’t produce
At the AWI ice laboratories, part of an ice core from the North Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS) is currently being tested. The core was collected during “EastGRIP”, a joint project involving several international [...] allowing them to penetrate the entire ice stream and reach the rocky substrate below. The analysis of the ice core is to yield new insights into the behaviour of ice streams and improve our grasp of how [...] how they could contribute to future sea-level rise. Another goal is to record past climatic conditions beneath the northeast section of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Numerous laboratories around the globe plan
Food web Algae that live in and under the seaice play a much greater role for the Arctic food web than previously assumed. In a new study, biologists of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre [...] and Marine Research showed that not only animals that live directly under the ice thrive on carbon produced by so-called ice algae. Even species that mostly live at greater depth depend to a large extent [...] extent on carbon from these algae. This also means that the decline of the Arctic seaice may have far-reaching consequences for the entire food web of the Arctic Ocean. Their results have been published online
January 2017 9. January 2017 - 3 weeks and 3 days at sea. Yesterday evening Polarstern managed to push herself free between what was formerly fast ice by about half a ship´s length with the ebbing tide.
and's glaciers are losing ice at an accelerating rate, causing sea levels to rise dramatically. However, climate models have so far significantly underestimated how much ice could actually be lost by the [...] Wegener Institute was also involved. As a result, the contribution of Greenland's glaciers to future sea level rise is significantly higher than previously assumed.