News

Yesterday (8 July 2013) a huge area of the ice shelf broke away from the Pine Island glacier, the longest and fastest flowing glacier in the Antarctic, and is now floating in the Amundsen Sea in the form of a very large iceberg. Scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association have been following this natural spectacle via the earth observation satellites TerraSAR-X from the German Space Agency (DLR) and have documented it in many individual images. The data is intended to help solve the physical…

AWI-scientist Prof. Dr. Hans-Otto Pörtner and his colleague Dr. Sam Dupont (University of Gothenborg, Kristineberg, Sweden) publish in the current issue of the journal nature the article: “Get ready for ocean acidification“. They summarize the current status of knowledge and demonstrate needs for action. Their appeal: more interdisciplinary research has appeared necessary.

A new workshop building for the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, is being inaugurated on Heligoland on Thursday, 20 June 2013. The new workshop building completes the first phase of the so-called Bluehouse Greenhouse concept: the development of a modern research complex that achieves an energy balance which is as climate-neutral as possible. The building cost € 1.65 million, with investment especially in sustainable construction. The festive inauguration is the start of the open day of the Biological…

In collaboration with an international team of researchers, scientists at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, have sequenced the genome of the calcified alga Emiliania huxleyi and have found an explanation for the enormous adaptive potential and global distribution of this unicellular alga. As the researchers report in an online prepublication of the scientific journal Nature, the microalga’s “trick” is genetic diversity. It has a particularly large so-called pan-genome which means that the unicellular algae…

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…

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…

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…

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…