Archive of News and Press Releases

Far beneath the ice shelves of the Antarctic, there is more marine life than expected, finds a recent study in the journal Current Biology, published this week (20 December 2021). Despite occupying nearly 1.6 million km2, ice shelves are amongst the least known environments on Earth. Life has been seen in these perpetual dark, cold and still habitats on camera but has rarely been collected. 

In the summer months, sea ice from the Arctic drifts through Fram Strait into the Atlantic. Thanks to meltwater, a stable layer forms around the drifting ice atop the more salty seawater, producing significant effects on biological processes and marine organisms. In turn, this has an effect on when carbon from the atmosphere is absorbed and stored, as a team of researchers led by the Alfred Wegener Institute has now determined with the aid of the FRAM ocean observation system. Their findings have just been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Can meeting CO2 emission targets and thus limiting global warming prevent Antarctic ice from melting catastrophically? An international research team is preparing to drill into the sediment of the seabed deep beneath Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf to find out.

Over the past decade, interest in using the marine coastal areas as a source of alternative, sustainable food production has grown significantly. A team of experts from 28 countries, including scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) has launched the SeaWheat project as a part of the EU program “COST” to modernise traditional aquatic diet from the coastal seas to make them more sustainable and healthier.

Over the next few decades, anthropogenic climate change and the resultant changes in the global water cycle will produce a significant rise in drought frequency in the Northern Hemisphere. An international team of scientists led by climate researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute arrive at this conclusion in a new study released today in the journal npj Climate and Atmospheric Science. The experts analysed climate simulations produced by the latest generation of models for three different emissions-and-development scenarios and investigated the…