News

In the future, the Antarctic could become a greener place and be colonised by new species. At the same time, some species will likely disappear. 25 researchers recently presented these and many other findings in a major international project, in which they analysed hundreds of articles on the Antarctic published in the past ten years. By doing so, the team have provided an exceptionally comprehensive assessment of the status quo and future of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean that surrounds it. 

The alga Vaucheria velutina has been chosen “Alga of the Year 2021”. The Phycology Section of the German Society for Plant Sciences recently elected this introduced species “due to its sudden dominance and the unforeseeable ecological impacts” that its novel appearance in the northern Wadden Sea could entail. Mud gets trapped in the tube-like filaments of this alga, while other species of Vaucheria only thrive in salt marshes. As a result, lugworm burrows become clogged, and this eventually is transforming the Wadden Sea ecosystem. Coastal scientist Prof…

Until recently, what we knew about the lives of baleen whales in the Southern Ocean was chiefly based on research conducted during the Antarctic summer. The reason: in the winter, there were virtually no biologists on site to watch for the animals. Experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), have now used permanently installed underwater microphones, which have been recording for the past nine years, to successfully gather and analyse whale observation data from the Weddell Sea. The audio recordings…

This year, the Alfred Wegener Institute’s Neumayer Station III will be exclusively supplied by sea. The research vessel Polarstern will transport– as usual – materials and fuel to the Antarctic. However, due to the coronavirus, this season all the staff who will work at the station will also travel to the Southern Continent by ship.

 

“Making theatre in a time of global crisis” - that was the title of the international online conference of the Open University of Cyprus. AWI Director Antje Boetius gave a keynote on the subject of “The tragedy of climate change, the utopia of the ark and how we are all in this play”. The full conference is available online.

In the past 20 years, Central Europe has experienced six summer heat waves and droughts. Until now, however, it was unclear what factors led to these extreme events. Researchers from two Helmholtz Centres (AWI & UFZ) have now discovered that in Central Europe, temperature and precipitation patterns in April play a vital role in determining whether or not the soils are drier than average in the following summer. If the April is too warm, with little precipitation, a large proportion of the moisture stored in the soil evaporates, making a summer drought…

At what depth beneath the seabed does it become so hot that microbial life is no longer possible? This question is the focus of a close scientific cooperative effort between the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) and MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen. An expedition by the drilling program IODP (International Ocean Discovery Program) in 2016, in which also an AWI scientist was involved, has provided new insights into the temperature limits of life beneath the ocean floor. The findings…

The frozen permafrost in the Arctic is thawing on an alarming scale. By analysing an annual record of satellite images, researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute have now confirmed these findings: thermokarst lakes in Alaska are draining one by one because warmer and wetter conditions cause deeper thaw, effectively weakening frozen ground as a barrier around lakes. In the season 2017/2018, lake drainage was observed on a scale that model outputs didn’t expect until the end of the century.

Speakers from public authorities, politics, business, science and civil society discussed the challenges of fishing in and using the North Sea and Baltic Sea in sustainable ways
What impact will the exclusion of bottom trawling have on marine protected areas in the German Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the North Sea and Baltic Sea? Two pilot missions in the North Sea and Baltic Sea, which started in March, are examining this key question as part of the research mission “Protection and Sustainable Use of Marine Areas” of the German Marine Research…

The reintroduction of oysters into European waters is one of the main objectives of the Native Oyster Restoration Alliance (NORA). AWI scientists Bernadette Pogoda and Corina Peter are also playing a major role in this alliance. The Alliance has now published a comprehensive collection of publications on this topic in the journal "Aquatic Conservation": Unlocking the blueprint for native oyster restoration in Europe