News

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…

A massive ecological change is underway in the Arctic. Due to rising water temperatures, many Arctic fish species are retreating farther and farther north, while species from more temperate latitudes are increasingly being sighted off the coasts of Greenland and Svalbard. Experts from Kiel University, the University of Tromsø, and the Alfred Wegener Institute have now analysed scientific publications on the ecological impacts of climate change in Arctic seas released in the past ten years. Their findings: the shifting habitats have affected entire biotic…

Since late summer last year, 50 sound clips from the Arctic and Antarctic seas have been made available for sound artists and musicians from all over the world to creatively reinterpret. On Monday, the resulting compositions will be published at citiesandmemory.com/polar-sounds. As part of the Polar Sounds project, the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity at the University of Oldenburg (HIFMB) and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) are collaborating with one of the world’s largest sound…

The second drilling campaign of Beyond EPICA - Oldest Ice has been successfully completed. The international research project is funded by the European Commission with 11 million euros and coordinated by the Institute of Polar Sciences of the CNR. It aims to obtain data on the evolution of temperatures, the composition of the atmosphere and the carbon cycle, by going back in time 1.5 million years through analyzing an ice core extracted from the depths of the Antarctic ice sheet. The complex deep ice drilling system was installed quickly, kicking off…