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Attractive pictures, a clear menu and easily accessible information - this is how the new website of the Helmholtz Climate Initiative presents itself.

Polar bears in the MOSAiC research camp: The jury of World Press Photo, the largest photo competition for press photography, found this photo “worthy of an award” and so AWI photographer Esther Horvath and her two polar bears were nominated in the “Environment” category. On April 16, the photographer learns whether her photo has won and will be touring 80 cities worldwide for one year as part of a travelling exhibition.

For days, fast sea ice had slowed the progress of the resupply icebreaker Kapitan Dranitsyn; bound for the North Pole, her mission was to support the second exchange of researchers and crew in the MOSAiC expedition. Nevertheless, she steadily drew closer to her destination, and finally, at 12:20 pm (CET) on Friday, 28 February, dropped anchor 970 metres from Polarstern, moored to the same floe. While the handover is in full swing on the MOSAiC floe, in Russia another icebreaker will soon leave port in order to supply Kapitan Dranitsyn with additional…

The documentary film meeting "Top of the docs" gave a look at the highlights of ARD documentary on the edge of the Berlinale. One of the films presented will document the MOSAiC expedition. For this, film teams accompany the entire expedition for one year. The result will be broadcast on prime time in November 2020. Pinar Atalay spoke to expedition leader Markus Rex and filmmaker Philip Grieß about the course of the expedition and the shooting under the extreme conditions of the arctic winter.

Prof Hans-Otto Pörtner, Co-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II and Head of the Integrative Ecophysiology Section at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, has been selected as a new member of the European Academy of Sciences (EurASc). 

In the course of the past 40 years, the major wind-driven current systems in the ocean have steadily shifted toward the poles. Experts at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), came to this conclusion after analysing long-term global satellite data on the ocean surface temperature and sea level height. Both datasets offer insights into the evolution of large-scale surface currents, and indicate that, in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere alike, the borders of the ocean gyres and their boundary currents are…

The permafrost regions of the Arctic, often referred to as nature’s iceboxes, contain tremendous amounts of carbon, mainly in the form of animal and vegetable matter accumulated in frozen soils over millennia. Yet microorganisms break down this matter as soon as the frozen soil begins to thaw, releasing the harmful greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide. An international team of researchers has now determined that rapid thaw processes have a significant influence on the amount and types of gases released but were not considered in permafrost…

The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) today cancelled the Europe-wide call for tenders for the procurement of a new polar research vessel, Polarstern II, for legal reasons. In times of unresolved climate issues, the research mission of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) can only be fulfilled in the long term with a modern icebreaker. This understanding is also shared by the BMBF. Therefore, we will work intensively with the BMBF to find a solution, which also aims to set up a new award…

The Arctic is warming more strongly than any other region on Earth, which leads to serious erosion of coasts where organic matter was frozen in the permafrost for thousands of years. Once eroded material is released into the ocean, microorganisms break down ancient plant remains, releasing sizable quantities of greenhouse gases. Yet, as the latest analyses conducted by AWI experts show, part of the biomass released becomes trapped in deep sinks on the ocean floor off the Arctic coast – where it is protected from microbial decomposition. The outcomes of…

The Greenland Ice Sheet is melting faster today than it did only a few years ago. The reason: it’s not just melting on the surface – but underwater, too. AWI researchers have now found an explanation for the intensive melting on the glacier’s underside, and published their findings in the journal Nature Geoscience.