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Where the Earth’s plates meet, there is evidence of their motion. An expedition of the Research Vessel Polarstern will explore this activity in the Southern Ocean in detail. The major focus of the expedition led by scientists from MARUM is to examine hot vents and cold seeps. This will be the first deployment of the remotely operated vehicle MARUM-QUEST in the Antarctic region. The start of the expedition is scheduled for 13 April 2019.

In the context of a major European Union project, experts from 14 institutions in ten European countries have spent three years combing the Antarctic ice, looking for the ideal site to investigate the climate history of the past 1.5 million years. Today, the consortium Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice (BE-OI), led by Olaf Eisen from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven, presented its findings at the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna.

The dramatic loss of ice in the Arctic is influencing sea-ice transport across the Arctic Ocean. As experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research report in a new study, today only 20 percent of the sea ice that forms in the shallow Russian marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean actually reaches the Central Arctic, where it joins the Transpolar Drift; the remaining 80 percent of the young ice melts before it has a chance to leave its ‘nursery’. Before 2000, that number was only 50 percent. According to the…

The symposium in Lisbon was attended by high-ranking representatives of the Portuguese funding organisation and the University of Lisbon. Representatives from all over Europe and the European Commission were also present. AWI Director Antje Boetius gave the keynote speech.

There is a wide variety of animals living on the Arctic seabed. Attached to rocks, they feed by removing nutrients from the water using filters or tentacles. But it can take decades for these colonies to become established, and they probably don’t achieve their natural diversity until much later. These are the findings of a unique 18-year study by researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), which has now been published in the scientific journal “Limnology and Oceanography”.

The International Council for Exploration of the Sea (ICES) honors Jennifer Dannheim with the ICES Service Award for her work as Chair of the Working Group on Marine Benthal and Renewable Energy Developments (WGMBRED).

Not all of the CO2 generated during the combustion of fossil fuels remains in the atmosphere and contributes to global warming. The ocean and the ecosystems on land take up considerable quantities of these man-made CO₂ emissions from the atmosphere. Without this sink, the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere and the extent of anthropogenic climate change would be considerably higher.

A few days ago, the captain and the head of the current Polarstern expedition jointly decided to abandon their efforts to reach the Larsen C Ice Shelf. Since dense sea ice and ice ridges blocked the planned route, the ship has now set course for alternative research sites further to the north.

On the evening of 6 March 2019, His Majesty King Willem-Alexander and Her Majesty Queen Máxima of the Netherlands will visit the Alfred Wegener Institute as part of their tour of the State of Bremen. Dutch and German researchers will report to the royal couple on their collaborations regarding climate change, biodiversity and nature conservation, sign a joint declaration, and subsequently gather for a festive dinner.

The bottom of the Baltic Sea is home to large quantities of sunken munitions, a legacy of the Second World War – and often very close to shore. Should we simply leave them where they are and accept the risk of their slowly releasing toxic substances, or should we instead remove them, and run the risk of their falling apart – or even exploding? Administrators and politicians face these questions when e.g. there are plans for building a new wind park, or laying an underwater cable. In the course of the international project DAIMON, researchers prepared…