News

A previously underestimated risk lurks in the frozen soil of the Arctic. When the ground thaws and becomes unstable in response to climate change, it can lead to the collapse of industrial infrastructure, and in turn to the increased release of pollutants. Moreover, contaminations already present will be able to more easily spread throughout ecosystems. A team led by Moritz Langer and Guido Grosse from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Potsdam investigated the potential scale of this problem. According to their findings, there are at least 13,000 to…

The AWI's Communication & Media Unit has been awarded by Informationsdienst Wissenschaft e.V. (idw) for the Science Press Release of the Year 2022. The AWI press release 'World's largest fish breeding area discovered in Antarctica' took second place in the competition. The idw award recognises press releases that stand out for their high level of technical professionalism, outstanding news value and scientific relevance. The award ceremony took place in Munich today.

Every year, the waters of the polar regions are still covered by sheets of ice for weeks or months on end. But this sea ice is increasingly disappearing due to climate change. A glimpse into our planet’s past now reveals the dramatic effects this can have for regional ecosystems: during the seasonal transition from ice-covered to ice-free conditions, the entire biotic community can change. This was the main conclusion arrived at by a team from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, based on an analysis of ancient DNA from the ocean floor. These changes…

The Helmholtz Association is funding three new innovation platforms with a total of 40 million euros. One of these platforms is coordinated at GEOMAR under the leadership of Toste Tanhua in collaboration with AWI and Hereon: Shaping an Ocean Of Possibilities (SOOP) aims to develop sustainable ocean observing structures and technologies to collect important data, improve access to ocean data and thus expand knowledge about the ocean. Funding for SOOP will start in the 2nd quarter of 2023. To the GEOMAR press release

Following lengthy negotiations, today the IPCC presented the new Synthesis Report for its sixth reporting cycle in Interlaken, Switzerland. The document summarises the findings of its three Working Groups and three Special Reports. Intended for political decision-makers and the general public alike, it offers a valuable basis of discussion for future climate negotiations.

With its new landing page, the Helmholtz Research Field "Earth & Environment" with its seven centers AWI, GEOMAR, Hereon, KIT, FZJ, GFZ and UFZ creates a central access point to Earth System Research and the manifold digital information and offers of the Helmholtz Association. Access to the landing page can be installed as a Progressive WebApp (PWA) via the browser on the home screen of smartphones. 

The ocean has a large effect on our planet’s climate. In this regard, mesoscale – i.e., medium-sized – eddies, which constitute essentially the weather on the ocean, could be far more important than previously believed. Accordingly, a new project, led by the Alfred Wegener Institute has just been launched in order to more precisely assess this aspect: by doing so, “European Eddy Rich Earth System Models” (EERIE) could significantly improve today’s Earth system models and therefore projections of the climate’s future development.

If climate change continues at the current pace, it is very likely that a majority of marine species will lose considerable amounts of their currently suitable habitat ranges by the end of this century. This is the result of a modelling study published in the current issue of the scientific journal Global Change Biology. The interdisciplinary team of researchers included scientists of the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine biodiversity at the University of Oldenburg (HIFMB), the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine…

There is currently less sea ice in the Antarctic than at any time in the forty years since the beginning of satellite observation: in early February 2023, only 2.20 million square kilometres of the Southern Ocean were covered with sea ice. Researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute and the University of Bremen analyse the situation for the Sea Ice Portal. January 2023 had already set a new record for its monthly mean extent (3.22 million square kilometres), even though the melting phase in the Southern Hemisphere continues until the end of February.…

“Citizen Science” gives interested citizens the chance to actively engage in scientific research. A citizen-science project conducted by AWI in the Arctic now shows just how successful this can be. In the course of five years, citizens who went on sailing cruises to the Arctic surveyed and collected plastic debris that had washed up on the shores of Svalbard. This has now been analysed by the Alfred Wegener Institute. According to the findings, one third of the plastic debris which still bore imprints or labels allowing an analysis of their origin came…