Archive of News and Press Releases
Week 9: Fish!
As soon as we reached the more open marginal sea ice zone in the Barents Sea east of Svalbard, we could finally start fishing with the bottom trawl. Most parts of our area of investigation had a closed pack-ice cover reaching far south onto the Svalbard and Barents Sea shelves. This heavy sea ice situation had forced us to postpone most of the bottom trawl fishing to the end of the expedition. This postponement was a hard challenge for the fisheries biologists on board. During the ~ 1 ½ days of steaming from the last CTD transect to the Barents Sea, the…
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Week 8: Returning to Svalbard
After concluding our 4th ice station at the northernmost location of this expedition, Polarstern set a south-westerly course, heading for the position of our well-known PASCAL ice floe of PS 106/1. This time, many open leads allowed a mostly gentle passage through the ice. Our journey was inter-spaced with stations where we set out Polarstern’s rubber boats Laura and Luisa to sample the surface microlayer, conducted CTD casts and performed hauls with our full range of zooplankton and under-ice fauna sampling gear: LOKI with AquaScat, Multinet, RMT and…
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Time to rise and shine
The copepod species Calanus finmarchicus schedules its day using a genetic clock that works independently of external stimuli. The clock shapes the copepod’s metabolic rhythms and daily vertical migration. This in turn have an enormous influence on the entire food web in the North Atlantic, where Calanus finmarchicus is a central plankton species. Wherever the high-calorie copepod is, determines where its predator species are. The results of the study will be published in the journal Current Biology.
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Antarctic biologists meet in Belgium
Antarctic scientists from all over the world meet in Leuven, Belgium, from July 10th to 14th. “Scale matters” is the overarching theme of the 12th biology symposium organized by SCAR, the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research. From the small molecular scale, through population and large ecosystem scale, biological processes and diversity span all these levels, and the contributions are accordingly variable.
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Week 7: In the deep Arctic Ocean
During our northward transect, Polarstern bit its way through heavy sea ice, hard as concrete and covered with a thick layer of snow. This altogether slowed down our progress into the north significantly. During our journey in the thick ice across the deepening Arctic Ocean, wildlife became scarcer and scarcer. Patches of Melosira arctica were only spotted rarely.
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Falling sea level caused volcanos to overflow
Throughout the last 800,000 years, Antarctic temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations showed a similar evolution. However, this was different during the transition to the last ice age: approximately 80,000 years ago, temperature declined, while the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere remained relatively stable. An international research team led by the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and the Alfred-Wegener-Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research has now discovered that a falling sea level may have…
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Week 6: From East Svalbard towards the deep Arctic Ocean
The past week we started in the marginal sea ice zone east of Svalbard, and then set course north into the central Arctic Ocean.The marginal sea ice zone was mostly covered with decaying sea ice and some larger ice-free areas. On this side of Svalbard we saw a lot more wildlife than in the westerly part. A large number of birds are constantly circling around the ship looking for fish, which can be spotted on overturning ice floes during ice breaking.
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Week 5: From Longyearbyen around Svalbard
The end of PS106/1 was garnished with amazing views of the Spitsbergen coastline in the midnight sun (Fig. 1). While scientists and crew members celebrated the successful completion of the PASCAL study and its interdisciplinary physical, biological and biogeochemical partners, wales and seals occasionally approached Polarstern.
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Week 2 at the ice floe
The TROPOS aerosol container, with online and off-line instrumentation (high volume and size-resolved samplers), was installed on Polarstern on the upper deck to measure in-situ atmospheric aerosol physical-chemical properties.
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German Association for Marine Technology at the AWI
The Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) welcomed members of the Association for Marine Technology (GMT). The AWI is itself a member of the association for offshore and marine technology, which, among other things, is committed to the transfer of knowledge and technology between science and industry in the marine-maritime field.
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