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Press release
How do krill survive the Antarctic winter? Two-months dive expedition with RV Polarstern ends in Cape Town
[15. October 2013]
Scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute together with international colleagues could analyse the distribution and behaviour of larval and juvenile krill beneath wintery Antarctic sea ice for the first time. In order to decrypt the life cycle of this ecologically important species 51 scientists and technicians as well as 44 crewmembers sailed the Weddell Sea for 63 days. The expedition, which started in Punta Arenas (Chile) ends in Cape Town (South Africa) on Wednesday, 16 October.
Press release
Polarstern: DLR and AWI test satellite-based methods for improving maritime navigation
[11. October 2013]
The German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) is working on a satellite-based system for substantially improving ship navigation in ice-affected waters. The Earth observation satellites TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X provide the high-resolution images needed to make this possible. Scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) – the Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research based in Bremerhaven – are currently on their way to Antarctica on board the research vessel 'Polarstern' to test the practicality of this technique.
Press release
Traces of immense prehistoric ice sheets: the climate history of the Arctic Ocean needs to be rewritten
[26. September 2013]
Geologists and geophysicists of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), discovered traces of large ice sheets from the Pleistocene on a seamount off the north-eastern coast of Russia. These marks confirm for the first time that within the past 800,000 years in the course of ice ages, ice sheets more than a kilometre thick also formed in the Arctic Ocean. The climate history for this part of the Arctic now needs to be rewritten, report the AWI scientists jointly with their South Korean colleagues in the title story of the current issue of the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.
Press release
Long-term data reveal: The deep Greenland Sea is warming faster than the World Ocean
[24. September 2013]
Recent warming of the Greenland Sea Deep Water is about ten times higher than warming rates estimated for the global ocean. Scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research recently published these findings in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. For their study, they analysed temperature data from 1950 to 2010 in the abyssal Greenland Sea, which is an ocean area located just to the south of the Arctic Ocean.
Press release
Current sea ice development in the Arctic: edge of the pack ice retreats significantly, but the area is greater than in 2012
[19. September 2013]
The annual minimum sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean in September is on average around 5.1 million square kilometres this year, and is thus some 50 percent above the previous negative record of 3.4 million square kilometres recorded in 2012. “This figure does not signal a reversal in the trend, however”, is the joint conclusion drawn by sea ice physicist Marcel Nicolaus from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), and Lars Kaleschke from the University of Hamburg, KlimaCampus (Climate Campus).
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