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The “Germany-Iceland Clean Energy Summit” will be held in Berlin on June 12th. The summit brings together government officials, businesses and civil society groups from Iceland and Germany to discuss how international cooperation can be increased to achieve climate goals. Besides the German federal minister for economics and climate protection Robert Habeck, AWI director Antje Boetius will also take part in a discussion. She will speak about the future challenges and opportunities that will arise related to the climate. More information

This year's World Oceans Day is themed: Planet Ocean - Tides are changing. The central celebration will take place at the United Nations in New York from 10:00 local time (16:00 CEST). Prof. Dr Hans-Otto Pörtner, biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute and Co-Chair of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will give the keynote lecture "Ocean x Climate" at 11:40 local time (17:40 CEST).

A successful cooperation in international polar research celebrates its 20th anniversary. In 2003, the German Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) and the French Polar Research Institute Paul-Émile Victor (IPEV) merged their stations Koldewey and Rabot on Svalbard to form the AWIPEV base. Since then, scientists from both countries have jointly been conducting research there on the effects of climate change in the Arctic as part of the Ny-Ålesund research station coordinated by Norway. The anniversary of the successful partnership will be celebrated on June 14,…

Topping-out ceremony for the new AWI building for seawater circuits: The AWI has several distributed aquarium facilities in the Bremerhaven urban area. These will now be bundled together with a new building. The building, which will cover a good 1000 square meters, will contain three self-contained circulation systems, each with about 20 cubic meters of seawater. These reflect the Polar Sea, North Atlantic and North Sea habitats to be studied. Each circulation system can be individually tempered between -2 °C and +20 °C. Commissioning is planned for…

More than 280 scientists from all over the world are meeting in Bremerhaven for the "International Symposium on Sea Ice". Their common goal is to exchange research methods and results on the topic of sea ice and snow in the Arctic and Antarctic. The conference will run until June 9. More info.

In response to climate change, the mean sea surface temperature has risen substantially. Yet some ocean regions like the Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica have hardly warmed at all, or even grown slightly cooler, over the past 40 years. A team of experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) has now succeeded in confirming that this phenomenon is only a temporary state at the beginning of an extremely long-term climate change, in the course of which precisely those areas that are cooler today will warm…

The Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Marine and Polar Research (AWI), is delighted to announce the start of the last cohort of the NF-POGO Centre of Excellence at AWI, a comprehensive oceanographic training programme on the North Sea Islands of Helgoland and Sylt. The new participants from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, India, Madagascar, Tanzania, Somalia, Lebanon, Portugal, Brazil and Argentina will be the last cohort before the ten-year programme rotates to another hosting institution.

AWI Director Antje Boetius presented the international Antarctic program "Antarctica InSync" at this year's ATCM meeting in Helsinki: The project will study Antarctica year-round with international partners. The ATCM is the annual consultative meeting of the Antarctic Treaty States. At the conference, decisions are made by the treaty states for Antarctica, since this continent itself has no government.

Microbial communities in marine sediments are able to use ancient material as a carbon source. Although they prefer fresh organic material, if there is not enough of it, microbes also use carbon from rocks. Since this bacterial metabolism releases greenhouse gases, this process is an additional source of fossil greenhouse gases. This is the result of a study led by the Alfred Wegener Institute, which has now been published in the journal Nature Geosciences. 

There are many effects of climate change. Perhaps the most broadly known is global warming, which is caused by heat building up in various parts of the Earth system, such as the atmosphere, the ocean, the cryosphere and the land. 89 percent of this excess heat is stored in the oceans, with the rest in ice and glaciers, the atmosphere and land masses (including inland water bodies). An international research team led by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and with participation of scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute has now…