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On next Tuesday, 27 January 2015, Prof Karen Wiltshire will assume the office of Chair for the oceanographic research organisation POGO. During her upcoming one-year term of office the Vice-Director of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), plans to promote the formation of partnerships between research ships in the Atlantic, and to improve the networking of researchers who use long-term data. Further, she hopes to encourage scientists to take on a more proactive role in the establishment of marine protected areas.
For the first time, researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) have successfully employed a geochemical method used in glacier research to decode climate data from millennia-old permafrost ground ice and reconstruct the development of winter temperatures in Russia’s Lena River Delta. Their conclusions: Over the past 7,000 years, winter temperatures in the Siberian permafrost regions have gradually risen. The researchers claim that this is due to the changing position of the Earth relative to the sun and is amplified by the rising greenhouse-gas emissions since the dawn of industrialisation. The study will be published as the cover story of the upcoming February issue of the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.
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Germany’s southernmost library can be found at 70°40´S, 08°16´W and has endured in one of our planet’s most inhospitable regions for ten years now. In the 2004/2005 summer in the southern hemisphere, the Cologne-based artist Lutz Fritsch erected the “Library in the Ice” on the Antarctic Ekström Ice Shelf – to create a space for interaction between science and culture in the far reaches of the “white continent”. Ever since, the library container and its collection of books have been fixtures at the Neumayer Station, a research station operated by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI).
The German research icebreaker Polarstern will end its current expedition to the Antarctic earlier than planned. Due to hydraulic problems in the port engine, the ship will return to Bremerhaven for repairs in mid-March.
Cool currents from the deep ocean could save tropical corals from lethal heat stress. Researchers from Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and Phuket Marine Biological Center observed internal waves preserving corals in the Andaman Sea. Because satellites do not detect these small-scale phenomena, local measurements are crucial for the establishment and monitoring of protected areas, the scientists point out in the January issue of the "Proceedings of the Royal Society B".
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