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While determining the age of a permafrost layer in Siberia, an international team of experts set a new record: at its deepest point, the soil is at least 650,000 years old. Yet the team’s findings, just published in the magazine Quaternary Research, also reveal how sensitive the soil is to disturbances – and how quickly it can be destroyed.

The influx of warmer water masses from the North Atlantic into the European marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean plays a significant role in the marked decrease in sea-ice growth, especially in winter. Sea-ice physicists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), together with researchers from the US and Russia, now present evidence for this in two new studies, which show that heat from the Atlantic has hindered ice growth in the Barents and Kara Seas for years. Furthermore, they demonstrate that the invasion of…

An eleven-member expedition team is currently underway in the North Atlantic with the Alfred Wegener Institute's research vessel Heincke.

The fight against global warming and for sustainable development can only succeed if, from now on, humankind considers the issues of climate change, biodiversity loss and social justice together, and takes them into account equally in all political decisions – globally, nationally and regionally – as well as their interactions. According to the German co-authors, this is the most important takeaway from a new workshop report on biodiversity and climate change, the first to be jointly prepared by experts from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform…

The Alfred Wegener Institute is setting new standards for sustainability in German maritime shipping. On 8 June 2021 the keel for the successor to the research cutter Uthörn will be laid at the Fassmer Shipyard in Berne, Lower Saxony. The 35-metre-long cutter will be the first seagoing vessel in Germany equipped with an environmentally friendly and especially low-emission methanol-fuelled drive system.

A process-based model reveals that how much carbon peatlands may lose—or accumulate—in the future varies from place to place.

An international research team has now determined that the preindustrial atmosphere contained far more aerosols from fires and slash-and-burn agriculture than indicated by previous studies. Since soot particles have a cooling effect on the Earth, some climate models may now need to be adjusted.

Experts at the Alfred Wegener Institute have, for the first time, experimentally measured the release of iron from the fecal pellets of krill and salps under natural conditions and tested its bioavailability using a natural community of microalgae in the Southern Ocean. In comparison to the fecal pellets of krill, Antarctic phytoplankton can more easily take up the micronutrient iron from those produced by salps. Observations made over the past 20 years show that, as a result of climate change, Antarctic krill are increasingly being supplanted by salps…

During the era of commercial whaling, fin whales were hunted so intensively that only a small percentage of the population in the Southern Hemisphere survived, and even today, marine biologists know little about the life of the world’s second-largest whale. That makes the findings of researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the Johann Heinrich von Thünen Institute for Sea Fisheries, which show that a large number of the baleen whales regularly frequent the krill-rich waters surrounding…

The 17th International Architecture Exhibition opened in Venice last weekend. "How will we live together?" is the motto. Also included is a holistic work about Antarctica, in which several AWI scientists participated. "Antarctic Resolution" takes a multidisciplinary look at the continent's unique geography, its unparalleled scientific potential, its contemporary geopolitical significance, its experimental governance system and its extreme inhabitant model. (Copyright Photo: UNLESS. Photo by DSL Studio)