Archive of News and Press Releases
AWI Director as a lecturer in Beijing
The National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) organize the conference series "Science for Future".
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New Climate Model for the IPCC
Researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute now, for the first time, feed the results from their global models directly into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change database. The data is particularly interesting because the underlying model, developed at the AWI, depicts the sea ice and the oceans with far greater definition than conventional methods. The results are used by climate scientists and stakeholders around the globe to determine the effects of climate change on humans and the environment.
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Working in Hausgarten
A large part of the work and projects that we scientists planned for this expedition are closely related to furthering the long-term observatory HAUSGARTEN, established by the AWI’s Deep-Sea Group 20 years ago, and to supporting the Helmholtz Infrastructure Initiative FRAM (Frontiers in Arctic Marine Monitoring). The long-term observatory Hausgarten is a network of twenty stations in the Fram Strait, whose coordinates are re-visited by us every year in the summer months.
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Long-term observations
In the last weekly report, we reported that a long-term observatory such as the HAUSGARTEN is defined by the implementation of regular, standardized investigations at set stations. Because of this, the course of an expedition such as PS121, for which the work is mostly dedicated to furthering the long-term observatory HAUSGARTEN, can be sketched out pretty well before the expedition.
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Stormy start
About a week ago, in the evening hours of August 10 in Bremerhaven, it was “lines off” for Polarstern, as she set course through the initially calm sea towards the long-term observatory area Hausgarten. Every single spot on the ship is full with us, 53 scientists, engineers, technicians, and students from various national and international research institutions.
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Anniversary in the far north
20 years ago, scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) laid the “foundation stone” for a unique long-term observatory in the partly ice-covered Fram Strait between Greenland and Svalbard, which they call their HAUSGARTEN. The deep-sea observatory is the first, and still the only one of its kind for year-round physical, chemical and biological observations in a polar region. Here researchers investigate how a polar marine ecosystem alters in a period of global change.
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All-in-one: New microbe degrades oil to gas
The tiny organisms cling to oil droplets and perform a great feat: As a single organism, they may produce methane from oil by a process called alkane disproportionation. Previously this was only known from symbioses between bacteria and archaea. Scientists from Joint Research Group for Deep-Sea Ecology and Technology of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (MPI), have now found cells of this microbe called Methanoliparia in oil reservoirs worldwide.
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Stardust in the Antarctica
The rare isotope iron-60 is produced by huge star explosions. Only a small proportion comes from remote stars. Researchers have now discovered iron-60 in the Antarctic for the first time. They have been able to draw spectacular conclusions from their findings.
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Microplastic drifting down with the snow
Over the past several years, microplastic particles have repeatedly been detected in seawater, drinking water, and even in animals. But these minute particles are also transported by the atmosphere and subsequently washed out of the air, especially by snow – and even in such remote regions as the Arctic and the Alps. This was demonstrated in a study conducted by experts at the Alfred Wegener Institute and at the Swiss WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, recently published in the journal Science Advances.
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Polarstern departs for the Arctic
On the evening of 10 August 2019, the research vessel Polarstern will leave her homeport in Bremerhaven. The purpose of the expedition is to conduct studies at a major long-term monitoring station in the Arctic: the AWI’s Hausgarten observatory in the Fram Strait, where experts from various disciplines are investigating all aspects of the ecosystem, from the water’s surface to the ocean depths, in order to determine the impacts of climate change on biodiversity in the Arctic. After roughly a month underway, in mid-September Polarstern will reach the…
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