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A group of researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research is flying to South Africa today. However this trip south is no summer holiday, but rather the start of a special journey: on Saturday, 8 June 2013 the research vessel Polarstern will be embarking on an expedition to the Antarctic winter. 49 researchers from institutes in twelve countries together with 44 crew members will spend a good two months in the Southern Ocean. They will be exploring the sea ice, the atmosphere and the ocean, until the expedition comes to an end on 12 August in Punta Arenas, Chile.
There are two reasons for celebration today at the Franco-German Arctic research station AWIPEV on Spitsbergen: firstly, the scientific community at the world’s northernmost research location marks the 10th year of cooperation between the German Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the French Institut Polaire Paul Emile Victor (IPEV). Secondly, the station is today the first meteorological facility in the world to be awarded with the seal of quality of GRUAN, the climate data network, the objective of which is to measure elevation profiles of climate parameters such as temperature, air pressure and air humidity according to uniform worldwide quality standards so as to globally compare observations.
Permafrost experts of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research are currently conducting a multi-week spring expedition to the Lena Delta where they are investigating the interaction between the atmosphere, snow cover and the frozen earth of the tundra. That they are able to live and conduct their research at less than spring temperatures of up to minus 30 degrees Celsius is attributable to the new Russian research station “Samoylov”. The impressive building was erected at the initiative of the Russian head of state Vladimir Putin and for one week has replaced the old German-Russian station from 1998 where scientists were only able to work in the short Siberian summer.
The Land of Lower Saxony is promoting a pilot project on the settlement of the European lobster in the “Riffgat“ offshore windpark with just under EUR 700,000. Researchers of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, are now starting on the rearing of 3,000 lobsters which they will be releasing in 2014. They wish to investigate whether lobsters successfully settle between the wind turbines.
Researchers have known for some years that the Atlantic cod beats the retreat in the direction of the Arctic when the waters in its traditional habitat become too warm. In summer, shoals from the Atlantic Ocean, for example, are now moving up as far as Spitsbergen into the waters the Arctic cod calls its own. In the next two and a half years, biologists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, together with scientists from Kiel, Bremen, Düsseldorf and Münster, will be seeking to discover the consequences of this climate-related migration on the stocks of these two commercial fish species, how the fish are responding to the water becoming warmer and more acidic and at which stages of life the changes are most dangerous to them.…
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