News

From January 30 to February 2, the Arctic Frontiers Conference „Moving North“ will be held in Tromsø, Norway. With participants from the science, indigenous community, business and more, the most pressing issues facing the Arctic will be discussed. On February 2, AWI Director Antje Boetius will participate as a speaker in the session "Science - Moving the Real World," which will focus on the importance of knowledge-based decision making, in general and in the Arctic in particular. More information

Researchers from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of Hamburg have come to Bremerhaven to process and analyze sea ice cores from the MOSAiC expedition at AWI. For this work, the freezer laboratory container of the MOSAiC expedition, which is normally only used at sea, has been set up in front of Building E. The researchers' goal is to better understand the growth history of sea ice and its optical properties. More information

AWI Director Antje Boetius will receive the Ernst Ludwig Winnacker Award from the Bayer Foundation on January 30. The award recognizes scientists who contribute to the dialogue between science and society. The award ceremony will be followed by a panel discussion on the topic of "Science and society - a broken relationship?". In addition to Boetius, the panel will include Jeanne Rubner from the TU Munich and Patrick Cramer from the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences.

Sea ice plays a central part in the Earth system: it cools our planet, shapes ocean currents, and offers a habitat for countless species. Yet climate change is causing sea ice in the polar regions to increasingly dwindle. In the Antarctic, sea-ice retreat is currently so intense that we could see a new record minimum in the second half of February 2023. The SEA ICE PORTAL offers essential information on this and many other developments. From today, the joint project of the Alfred Wegener Institute, the Helmholtz Climate Initiative REKLIM, and the…

A temperature reconstruction from ice cores of the past 1,000 years reveals that today’s warming in central-north Greenland is surprisingly pronounced. The most recent decade surveyed in a study, the years 2001 to 2011, was the warmest in the past 1,000 years, and the region is now 1.5 °C warmer than during the 20th century, as researchers led by the Alfred Wegener Institute just report in the journal Nature. Using a set of ice cores unprecedented in length and quality, they reconstructed past temperatures in central-north Greenland and melting rates of…

Yesterday, German Federal Research Minister Stark-Watzinger visited the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). She was joined by researchers from the German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ) and the AWI research unit in Potsdam to talk to scientists about the need for CO2-neutral energy sources. The AWI was represented by Ulrike Herzschuh, Julia Boike and the head of the research unit Bernhard Diekmann.

The German Association of University Professors and Lecturers (DHV – Deutsche Hochschulverband) honors Professor Antje Boetius as an excellent, multiple-award-winning scientist who uses extensive field research to examine the effects of climate change on the oceans and the diversity of life in the deep sea. Thanks to her research, Boetius is “an advocate of the oceans” who urges close international cooperation and is committed to promoting future-proof climate, nature, and environmental protection.

The 5-part science documentary "Climate Emergency: Feedback Loops" explores how human activities trigger chain reactions, setting in motion processes that can no longer be stopped - from melting ice in the Arctic, to thawing permafrost. The goal is to use the short films to teach the next generation about the urgency of climate change. AWI has provided footage from the MOSAiC expedition for the series. It is available online and can be used for teaching purposes.

The “Destination Earth” (DestinE) initiative from the EU Commission started in 2022 and is an important part of Europe's Green Deal and Digital Strategy. By 2030, DestinE aims to create a high-resolution digital model of the Earth to support climate change adaptation policies and decision-making for reducing the impacts of extremes. Numerous European authorities, climate research institutions and supercomputing centers are involved in the project. Alfred Wegener Institute is participating in DestinE with its ocean model FESOM, which efficiently simulates…

9 December 2022 marks the 40th anniversary of the research icebreaker Polarstern’s commissioning. Built by a consortium combining the shipyards Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft in Kiel and Werft Nobiskrug in Rendsburg, the Alfred Wegener Institute’s flagship has successfully completed more than 130 expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic and offered a temporary home for thousands of researchers from Germany and around the globe. In the process, the Polarstern has safely traversed 1.8 million nautical miles. The ship is currently on an expedition in the…