News

An international team of researchers has drilled the longest sediment core (228 m) to date under the Ross Ice Shelf in West Antarctica – some 700 kilometers away from the nearest research station. The samples obtained will provide insights into times when the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melted during the last 23 million years, covering periods when the Earth was warmer and richer in CO2 than it is today. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by up to five meters. Several German institutes are involved in the SWAIS2C…

AWI photographer Esther Horvath was a guest at the TEDx Talk on February 9 with her presentation “Stars of Polar Night”. She shared insights into her work in the Arctic and Antarctic, as well as at the AWIPEV research station in Ny-Ålesund. With personal experiences and striking photos captured during the polar night, she illustrates how scientists conduct research in one of the most remote regions on Earth. Watch the talk.

A team from the Deutsches Theater has embarked on a journey to Antarctica to produce a theatre play there. Director Jan-Christoph Gockel, cameraman Lion Bischof, and actors Julia Gräfner and Wolfram Koch are living and working at Neumayer Station III for four weeks to experience Antarctica up close and ultimately share their experiences with audiences in the play “POLARIS.” An event gave the audience a first taste of the play with a live link to Antarctica. More information.

On 20 March 2026, the glaciologist will take over as scientific director of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). To date, he has been active as the director of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.

With the departure of the research vessel Polarstern from Punta Arenas (Chile) scheduled for this weekend, the "Summer Weddell Sea Outflow Study" (SWOS) international expedition will commence. Up to early April, a multidisciplinary international research team will investigate the northwestern region of the Weddell Sea – an area of central importance for the global climate and ocean system, but one that can only be explored on site by research icebreakers such as the Polarstern due to challenging sea ice conditions.

The Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in Eastern Siberia is often described as the coldest permanently inhabited region on Earth. Despite this, it has been experiencing an increasing number of extreme wildfires in recent years, which are not only changing the ecosystem but are also endangering the people who live here. However, it is difficult to say how the fires start and what effects they have, as there has been little long-term data available for this region. Researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute have now reconstructed the regional fire dynamics in…

Plastic pollution is causing severe problems worldwide. However, negotiations at the United Nations in Geneva last August did not result in the expected global plastics treaty. On 7 February 2026, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) on Plastic Pollution will reconvene in Geneva to elect a new chairperson. In order to secure an agreement, the new chairperson must urgently reform INC procedures, argue Melanie Bergmann (Alfred Wegener Institute), Paul Einhäupl, Linda Del Savio (Research Institute for Sustainability), and Annika Jahnke…

A sediment core from the Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean has provided a research team from the Alfred Wegener Institute, the University of Oldenburg and the American Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory with evidence of an unexpected climate feedback in the Southern Ocean region: As the researchers report in the latest issue of Nature Geoscience, there was a close correlation between changes in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) and marine algae growth over previous glacial cycles – but the correlation was not as expected. The results suggest that…

Iron is an important micronutrient without which phytoplankton cannot grow. Pursuing a unique approach, a team from the Alfred Wegener Institute has now, for the first time, demonstrated experimentally that Antarctic phytoplankton can utilise iron from glacial meltwater. By contrast, however, the microscopic algae were unable to utilise iron released from groundwater into seawater. This contradicts previous assumptions, which were not experimentally proven, that iron from groundwater is also bioavailable, as the team has now published in the journal Comm…

On 23 January, Member of the German Bundestag (MdB) Leif Erik Bodin visited the AWI site on Sylt. He was welcomed by Maarten Boersma, Kerstin Mölter and Sabine Horn, before being given a tour of the institute that offered insights into the research activities conducted at the site. The visit concluded with an exchange on current topics.