Archive of News and Press Releases

A decade of excellence: Over the past ten years 100 scholars from 47 countries to become experts in marine science were trained at the Alfred Wegener Institute. This highly effective programme funded by the Nippon Foundation and the Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans (POGO) and the Alfred Wegener Institute is successfully completed. This is a perfect occasion to celebrate all candidates and their teachers, and the graduation of the ten current participants from ten different countries in Berlin at the Museum für Naturkunde – Leibniz…

At depths of more than 4,000 meters, cold, dense water masses from the Southern Ocean flow northwards into the large ocean basins, such as the Atlantic. This Antarctic bottom water drives deep-sea currents all over the world and circulates water masses to transport oxygen far down into the depths. An international research team, including the Alfred Wegener Institute, has now discovered that ocean currents have weakened by around twelve per cent due to the Antarctic bottom water. The study is published in Nature Geoscience.

In climate research, medicine, or the exploration of new materials for the energy transition, huge amounts of data are being generated. However, their full potential can only be realized if scientists can analyze ever-larger amounts of data. A new generation of AI foundation models is now poised to tackle a range of major challenges in science. The Alfred Wegener Institute is involved in two of the four pilot projects funded by the Helmholtz Association, one in a leading role. Helmholtz is funding the projects and the necessary infrastructure with around…

During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, ~21,000 years ago), the Laurentide ice sheet covered large parts of North America – reaching an ice thickness of more than 3 km, before it finally melted at the end of the ice age. To date, there have been few detailed studies of the evolution of the North American ice sheet into the LGM. In a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) have used a newly developed climate-ice model to draw conclusions about…

The role of clouds and warm air masses from the open ocean for the rapid warming of the Arctic is at the heart of a recent Alfred Wegener Institute project on Svalbard. The researchers are applying a new perspective and tracking how individual air masses cool above the sea ice, form clouds, and lose moisture through precipitation. To do so, they’re using specially designed weather balloons capable of continually measuring the temperature and humidity within a given air mass.