Archive of News and Press Releases
Using ice as a buoy
Our last ice station started September 22. This time we had also to consider limitations by the daylight since at 85°N the sun goes back to have a daily cycle again.
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New Tsunami scenarios for Indonesian Early Warning System
The earthquake and tsunami in Chile a few days ago show how important a precise early warning system is. Scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute support Indonesians to create new tsunami scenarios for the northeast of the archipelago.
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Marine biologists from around the globe meet on Helgoland
The 50th European Marine Biology Symposium takes place on Helgoland from 21th to 25th September 2015. Around 200 participants from 24 countries meet to discuss long-term changes to environmental conditions and ecosystems. This jubilee is a return to the roots: In 1966, the Biological Institute Helgoland hosted the first of these symposiums, which have since been held annually at different locations.
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Searching for suitable ice
On Friday evening we spent three hours searching for an ice floe. Not that there was no ice – just as during the whole cruise so far, also now our progress is hampered by huge ice floes that we have to circumvent, and ridges that we have to pass by ramming.
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Sea-ice zone has a major influence on the ecosystem
In the last 30,000 years there was, at times, more mixing in the Southern Ocean than previously thought. This meant that vast quantities of nutrients were available to phytoalgae, which in turn contributed to storing the greenhouse gas CO2 during the last glacial period. Researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) present these new findings in a study published in the journal Nature Communications.
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30 years of healing the ozone together
Today is the International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer.
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Endurance test for AWI robot "Tramper" in the deep sea
During their latest expedition on board the research vessel Sonne (So 242-2), researchers and engineers from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) successfully used the autonomous AWI robot, Tramper, for the first time on a deep-sea mission. The continuous-track vehicle’s first demo missions took place at a depth of about 4150 metres in an area of the subtropical Southeast Pacific around 850 km off the coast of Peru.
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In the Makarov Basin
On September 9, we sailed south along 120°W from the Amundsen Basin across the Lomonosov Ridge into the Makarov Basin, thereby conducting Large Rosette, Ultra-clean Rosette and XCTD casts.
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Where is the world’s permafrost thawing?
This Saturday at a conference in Quebec, Canada an international research team will present the first online data portal on global permafrost. In the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost (www.gtnp.org) researchers first collect all the existing permafrost temperature and active thickness layer data from Arctic, Antarctic and mountain permafrost regions and then make it freely available for download. This new portal can serve as an early warning system for researchers and decision-makers around the globe. A detailed description of the data collection…
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Revived oceanic CO2 uptake
A decade ago scientists feared that the ability of the Southern Ocean to absorb additional atmospheric CO2 would soon be stalled. But the analysis of more recent observations show that this carbon sink reinvigorated during the past decade.
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