Archive of News and Press Releases
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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Official Symposium and Ship Christening in Kiel
On 11 May 2018, a high-level symposium was held in Kiel in memory of Eugen Seibold, at which AWI Director Prof. Antje Boetius gave a keynote speech. Marine geologist Seibold has trained and shaped generations of marine researchers, and would have turned 100 this year. Following the symposium, a new research vessel was christened ‘Eugen Seibold’.
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Leaving Punta Arenas
On our arrival on 5th and 6th May the weather in Punta Arenas in Chile showed an unexpectedly pleasant side with scattered clouds, temperature just under 10°C and hardly any wind – unexpected, because here in the Southern Hemisphere it is now autumn and the climate at the southern extremity of Chile is harsh anyway. On 7th May the cruise participants were brought on board the Polarstern at anchor offshore by a harbour launch.
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Signs of tipping point for oxygen minimum zone in the ocean
When ocean temperatures change, the natural variability of the oxygen supply and the associated biogeochemical cycles don’t respond in a lineal manner. Instead, circa 6,000 years ago a tipping point was reached relatively suddenly. This was the key finding of a study by group of researchers led by geologists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), which has now been published in the journal PNAS.
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New species in the North Sea
Experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute and the Universities of Oldenburg and Potsdam, Germany have confirmed the existence of a new cryptic amphipod species in the North Sea. For the first time for the description of a new species, they used a level of mitogenomic information, which was normally applied in other areas of genetics. The discovery of Epimeria frankei was now published in the journal Scientific Reports. In the future, this level of molecular information could revolutionise biodiversity research.
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