Archive of News and Press Releases
Underwater robot scheduled to surface after a year exploring the Arctic depths
On Tuesday, 22 August the research icebreaker Polarstern will depart the Norwegian port of Tromsø for a unique expedition to the Arctic: the autonomous underwater robot TRAMPER is scheduled to resurface, after a full year of deep-sea exploration in the Arctic. It and other robotic systems jointly designed by deep-sea and aerospace researchers in the context of the Helmholtz Alliance ROBEX will now undergo nearly three weeks of testing under real-world operating conditions. The purpose of ROBEX is to develop new technologies for exploring remote regions…
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Federal Cross of Merit for Karin Lochte
AWI Director Prof. Dr. Karin Lochte has been awarded the Federal Cross of Merit on August 16 in Berlin. With this honor Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier appreciates the outstanding professional und private work of Karin Lochte.
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Long-term investigations & catching micro plastics
We finished our scientific program in the western Fram-Strait at the East-Greenland slope and went back to our main research area of the long-term observatory LTER-HAUSGARTEN – west off Svalbard. Like every summer here we realize an extensive sampling program from the sea-surface through the water column down to the seafloor. Here we are analyzing at almost twenty stations within water depth between 200 m and 5500 m seawater, plankton is caught, deep-sea sediments are sampled and photos and videos from the seafloor were made. By a multidisciplinary…
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How to find an eddy
On HAUSGARTEN cruises we typically study and sample the oceanographic conditions and the biological communities on a relatively large scale. Consecutive stations are often separated by 20-40 km or more. However, many important processes and physical-biological interactions take place on much smaller spatial scales. In order to show how new measurement and sampling techniques capable of achieving a high horizontal resolution in combination with interdisciplinary cooperation can study such small scale processes, we decided to launch a complementary…
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Into the unknown - high altitude research aircraft explores the upper levels of the Asian Monsoon
The Asian Monsoon System is one of the Earth’s largest and most energetic weather systems, and monsoon rainfall is critical to feeding over a billion people in Asia. An international team of scientists led by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) is now conducting the first-ever scientific mission to the upper levels of the monsoon system, using a high-altitude research aircraft flying out of Nepal. The results will help to better understand how this important weather system affects global climate and how it…
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Finally, we are let loose
In the late afternoon of June 23rd we (48 scientists, engineers, technicians and students from eleven nations) departed from Tromsø and enjoyed the marvellous weather. The sun was shining from a blue sky while POLARSTERN passed the fjords towards the North-Atlantic. Finally, we are let loose. In particular, the newbies are thrilled by this new experience of being on a research vessel heading to the Arctic. We set course north and when reaching the open Atlantic and the midnight sun was hiding behind a deep cloud cover, we all were looking forward for our…
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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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