Archive of News and Press Releases
The Tropical North Atlantic: Cold in the Water, Dust in the Sky
The whole week long we sailed in the North-east Trade Wind zone under skies with only a few clouds, but with strong head-winds for Polarstern. By crossing the northern tropic, the Tropic of Cancer, at 23° 26’ 05” North during the night of 31st May to 1st June we have left the Tropics and are again in the Subtropics. Although we have been moving through the Tropics and Subtropics, the water and air surrounding us with temperatures of around 20°C have been relatively cool, 10° colder than the daytime temperatures in much of Germany. That sounds like a…
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Cruising through the Blue
After entering the Tropics in the Southeast Trade Wind region and sailing under cloudless skies, the second half of the week was largely cloudy with frequent rainfall. We had arrived in the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone, in which the air masses transported by the Southeast Trade Winds and their northern hemispheric counterpart, the Northeast Trade Winds, rise up and produce thick clouds reaching high into the atmosphere.
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European Parliamentarian visiting AWI Helgoland
On May 25, the European Parliamentarian Regine Meißner (3rd from the left) visited Helgoland. In the lobster hall of the Biological Institute, Maarten Boersma reports on current projects. AWI Director Antje Boetius (r.) discussed with Meißner about EU research policy.
The German National Committee for Polar Research meets at GEOMAR
Anyone concerned with the development of the global climate, rising sea levels or changes in marine ecosystems must always keep the polar regions in mind. The Arctic and Antarctic, for example, play a central role in the system of global ocean currents, and the large but shrinking ice sheets are important factors in the Earth's radiation balance.
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Whitsun Excursion with a Towed System
Since crossing the Tropic of Capricorn at 23° 26’ 05” South on Thursday this week travelling north we find ourselves, according to the astronomical definition, in the Tropics. The weather is what you would expect; water and air temperature lie between 26 and 27°C. Since we have also arrived in the zone of the SE Trade Winds there is a stiff and steady breeze and by day the sun shines from a sky with few clouds into deep blue ocean water.
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For the past 70 years, the Danube has almost never frozen over
Today, only the eldest inhabitants of the Danube Delta recall that, in the past, you could skate on the river practically every winter; since the second half of the 20th century, Europe’s second-largest river has only rarely frozen over. The reason: the rising winter and water temperatures in Central and Eastern Europe, as a German-Romanian research team recently determined. Their analysis has just been published in the online magazine Scientific Reports.
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Keeping a Close Eye on Ice Loss
A few months ago, the GRACE mission’s two Earth observation satellites burnt up in the atmosphere. Although this loss was planned, for the experts at the Alfred Wegener Institute it left a considerable gap in monitoring ice loss in the Antarctic and Greenland. Now the follow-up mission will finally be launched, and will play a vital role in predicting future sea level rise.
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The gypsum gravity chute: A phytoplankton-elevator to the ocean floor
Tiny gypsum crystals can make phytoplankton so heavy that they rapidly sink, hereby transporting large quantities of carbon to the ocean’s depths. Experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute recently observed this phenomenon for the first time in the Arctic. As a result of this massive algal transport, in the future large amounts of nutrients could be lost from the surface waters.
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New approach to global-warming projections could make regional estimates more precise
A new method for projecting how the temperature will respond to human impacts supports the outlook for substantial global warming throughout this century – but also indicates that, in many regions, warming patterns are likely to vary significantly from those estimated by widely used computer models.
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AWI Director Antje Boetius and Federal Research Minister Anja Karliczek open tour of MS Wissenschaft
The journey of 'MS Wissenschaft', which starts today in Berlin, will last four and a half months. Until October 9, the exhibition ship will be travelling through 34 cities in Germany. On the route, the ship stops at the AWI sites Bremerhaven and Potsdam.
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