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Function and significance of the biological clocks in polar planktonic organisms are the focus of the virtual Helmholtz Institute entitled PolarTime starting July 1st, 2012. It is one of eleven new virtual institutes funded by the Helmholtz Association.
This Thursday, 14 June 2012, the research vessel Polarstern will leave Bremerhaven on course for the Arctic. 44 expedition participants from institutions from Germany, Belgium, USA and the United Kingdom will spend around one month at sea. Their main study area is the Fram Strait between Spitsbergen and Greenland where they will conduct long-term oceanographic measurements.
The North-East Passage, the sea route along the North coast of Rus-sia, is expected to be free of ice early again this summer. The forecast was made by sea ice physi-cists of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Associa-tion based on a series of measurement flights over the Laptev Sea, a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean. Amongs experts the shelf sea is known as an “ice factory” of Arctic sea ice. At the end of last winter the researchers discovered large areas of thin ice not being thick enough to withstand the summer melt.
The Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf fringing the Weddell Sea, Antarctica, may start to melt rapidly in this century and no longer act as a barrier for ice streams draining the Antarctic Ice Sheet. These predictions are made by climate researchers of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association in the coming issue of the British science magazine “Nature“. They refute the widespread assumption that ice shelves in the Weddell Sea would not be affected by the direct influences of global warming due to the peripheral location of the Sea.
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