POLARSTERN long-term expedition planning

Goals:
• Long-term ecological research in the water column and at the seafloor to detect and track the impact of large-scale environmental changes and pollutants in the transition zone between the northern North Atlantic and the central Arctic Ocean, and to determine the factors controlling Arctic deep-sea biodiversity.
• Permanent presence at sea, from surface to depth, for the provision of near real-time data on climate variability and ecosystem change in an Arctic marine system. Annual maintenance and exchange of fixed and mobile autonomous scientific platforms (e.g. moorings, benthic crawler, bottom-lander) and sensors (e.g. RAS, O2, CO2)
• Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) and Bottom-Lander/Crawler based biological in situ long-term studies and experiments, simulating Climate Change related impacts on deep-sea benthic communities.

Goals:
-Decipher the role of ridge systems for ocean current development and associated climate and environmental changes
-Elucidate central Arctic Ocean environmental conditions during warming climates (e.g., Miocene and Pliocene climate optima) 
-Investigate the onset and variability of 1) Arctic sea ice and 2) Greenland Ice Sheet in respect to paleo-sea level change 
-Unravel ice-ocean-atmosphere interactions that controlled the Cenozoic climate transition (Greenhouse to Icehouse) 
-Identify teleconnections between Arctic and Southern Ocean cryosphere developments   

Goals:
Transit cruise Bremerhaven - Walvis Bay

GOALS:
• Revealing both the timing of and environmental conditions just before, during, and after initial AIS formation at E/O boundary, i.e. transition from green- to icehouse conditions
• Identifying ice-proximal conditions during initial WAIS growth and during the mid-Miocene climatic optimum
• Constraining potential WAIS collapses during Plio- and Pleistocene super-interglacials in the key region for both understanding WAIS stability and defining tipping points
• Applying multi-proxy data from those critical time slices of AIS history as reliable target values for testing, validating, and improving numerical palaeo-ice sheet and climate models

GOALS:
• Krill stock assessment and niche partitioning between whales and krill in relation to krill fishing activity
• German contribution to CCAMLR in CCAMLR division 48.1
• The impact of key macrozooplankton grazers (salps, krill) on the biological carbon pump, iron remineralisation and its impact on primary productivity

Goals:
Transit cruise Punta Arenas - Bremerhaven