Archive of News and Press Releases
Pathogenic bacteria hitchhiking to North and Baltic Seas?
With increasing water temperatures comes an increasing likelihood of potentially pathogenic bacteria appearing in the North and Baltic Seas. AWI scientists have now proven that a group of such bacteria known as vibrios can survive on microplastic particles. In the future, they want to investigate in greater detail the role of these particles on the accumulation and possible distribution of these bacteria.
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Long-awaited breakthrough in the reconstruction of warm climate phases
Scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) have overcome a seeming weakness of global climate models. They had previously not been able to simulate the extreme warm period of the Eocene. One aspect of this era that particularly draws interests to climatologists: It was the only phase in recent history when greenhouse gas concentration was as high as researchers predict it to be for the future. The AWI scientists have now found that the apparent model weakness is due to a misinterpretation of the…
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“Groundwork”
As already announced in the last weekly report, today we will provide details about the work of the biogeochemists and biologists during “Polarstern” expedition PS99.2. Their goal is to investigate organisms and processes at the deep seafloor.
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One year alone in the deep sea of the Arctic
Far from any controls, an underwater robot has been working for the past few days in 2,500 metres of water on the seabed of the Arctic, after the completion of a successful test run. Researchers and engineers of the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) have deployed the deep-sea crawler Tramper for a year-round, fully autonomous mission for the first time. The mobile underwater robot, which has been developed within the Helmholtz Alliance Robotic Exploration of Extreme Environments (ROBEX), will now perform weekly…
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Minister of Environment visits AWIPEV station
Germans Federal Minister of Environment Barbara Hendricks visits Svalbard to get first hand information on climate change. Together with Karin Lochte and scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine research (AWI) she discusses global warming, which affects the Arctic particularly fast and heavily.
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Researchers simulate the emergence of leads in sea ice
Scientists from the Alfred-Wegener-Institute (AWI) and the University of Hamburg have succeeded in realistically simulating the emergence of large channels in the Artic sea ice in a computer model. Two approaches were decisive for this success: On the one hand, the researchers had increased the spatial resolution of the FESOM AWI sea-ice ocean model. On the other hand, they were able to improve the numerical solution to the equation so that the simulation of the lead formation holds up well when compared to real sea-ice satellite data. They reported this…
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Tracking marine litter in the Arctic from the air
On the current Polarstern expedition, scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute have deployed a multicopter with a high-resolution camera to quantify marine litter floating on the sea surface. The deep-sea researchers had recorded a marked increase of man-made litter on the Arctic seafloor over the last ten years. That was the reason to now start the programme for the quantitative analysis of waste-entry on the sea surface.
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Ice algae: The engine of life in the central Arctic Ocean
Algae that live in and under the sea ice play a much greater role for the Arctic food web than previously assumed. In a new study, biologists of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research showed that not only animals that live directly under the ice thrive on carbon produced by so-called ice algae. Even species that mostly live at greater depth depend to a large extent on carbon from these algae. This also means that the decline of the Arctic sea ice may have far-reaching consequences for the entire food web of the…
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Water World
As already announced in the last weekly report, today we will provide details about the work of the phyto-opticians, biogeochemists, planktologists and sedimentologist during RV Polarstern expedition PS99.2. Their goal is to investigate the organisms and processes in the water column.
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In the air, in the water column and at the deep seafloor
For about a week we have been operating in our investigation area, i.e. the LTER (Long-Term Ecological Research) Observatory HAUSGARTEN. In addition to our “traditional” gear to study the open and deep ocean, like water samplers, plankton nets, sediment corers and moorings, we will also deploy a number of comparably complex high-tech gear to complement our long-term studies. This includes an Un-manned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), a 3000 m depth-rated Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), free-falling lander systems (Bottom-Lander) and - for the first time in…
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