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Last weekend, the Alfred Wegener Institute and the Fundación San Ignacio del Huinay celebrated a research milestone with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). AWI director Antje Boetius and vice president Nelson Vásquez L. met at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso in Santiago de Chile. The MoU strengthens 15 years of cooperation focussing on the protection of ecosystems.

In 2001, Prof Karen Wiltshire began investigating changes in the ecosystems of the North Sea, particularly in the Wadden Sea, in connection with anthropogenic and natural influences – like climate change – at the Alfred Wegener Institute. Five years later, she was appointed Vice Director and Director of the AWI’s Biological Institute Helgoland. After working more than two decades in the High North, she assumed a new position at Trinity College Dublin and will found a new climate institute in the Irish capital. For this purpose, she will be on leave. Prof…

For a long time, scientists assumed that jellyfish were a dead-end food source for predatory fish. However, a team from the Alfred Wegener Institute together with the Thünen Institute has now discovered that fish in Greenland waters do indeed feed on jellyfish. In two of the analyzed species, they even made up the majority of the food, as the researchers describe in a study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. The results suggest that the role of jellyfish as prey in marine food webs should be reconsidered, especially in regards to the…

AWI Director Antje Boetius is taking part in the SCAR Open Science Conference 2024 on international collaboration in Antarctic research. On 22 August, she will lead a workshop at the conference in Pucón, Chile. The workshop will focus on the next steps of the Antarctica InSync programme, which investigates the Southern Ocean and Antarctica as part of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.

Industrial waste lurks in thousands of sites in the Arctic permafrost regions – some of it is highly toxic. If the permafrost thaws increasingly deeper due to the massive warming of the Arctic deeper and becomes unstable, ecosystems and the local communities can be endangered by the waste. In August, researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, together with national and international partners, therefore, keep a close eye on drilling mud pits in the Mackenzie Delta in which residues from oil and gas exploration are stored. The expedition is part of the…

Climate change can produce a range of effects on flat sedimentary coasts. Researchers from the Wadden Sea Station on Sylt have just released a multidisciplinary overview of the far-reaching climate-based changes in the Wadden Sea, a listed World Heritage Site. The review paper in celebration of the station’s centennial was published in the journal Marine Biodiversity. It covers the coastal morphology, including sediment dynamics, as well as the biology, from genetic effects to interspecies interactions, to the ecosystem level.

The intensifying global warming is increasingly affecting our planet. The Arctic and Antarctic are showing serious changes with far-reaching consequences for the global climate system. While the Greenland ice sheet and the sea ice in the Arctic are melting comparatively quickly today, the ice in the Antarctic is reacting more slowly and with a delay to climate change. Asymmetrical developments of the ice sheets have also occurred in the Earth's past. An international research team has now shown for the first time how such an asymmetric development of the…

The Southern Ocean plays an important role in absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere that is released by human activities - a process that is of crucial importance for climate change. In a new study, an international research group led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML), with the participation of the Alfred Wegener Institute, has found that the Southern Ocean around Antarctica absorbs more carbon dioxide (CO2) than previously thought. The results, which were published in the journal Science Advances, are based on a…

The documentary "Expedition Arktis 2 – Tauchfahrt am Nordpol" (Expedition Arctic 2 – Traveling underwater at the North Pole) by Philipp Grieß and Manuel Ernst has received the German Environment and Sustainability Award at NaturVision Film Festival. The festival is one of the largest international film festivals for nature and environmental topics. The award-winning film accompanies researchers during the ArcWatch-expedition. The prize is sponsored by the Ministry of the Environment, Climate Protection and the Energy Sector Baden-Württemberg.

Exactly 100 years ago, Germany’s northernmost research facilities on the North Sea island Sylt were opened. What began as a small field outpost for oyster research in 1924 would evolve into a modern, fully equipped research station that has been part of the Alfred Wegener Institute since 1998. Today, the AWI Wadden Sea Station on Sylt is pursuing answers to what is likely the most important question concerning the fragile ecosystem at its doorstep: how will climate change affect the Wadden Sea and North Sea in the long term?