Shedding more light in the darkness and depths of the polar night

With temperatures hovering around minus 30 degrees, icy winds and the darkness of the polar night: winter is not the most pleasant time to navigate around the coast of Spitsbergen in a small vessel. But that is exactly what a team headed up by Prof. Charlotte Havermans and Dr. Ayla Murray from the Alfred Wegener Institute undertook in the winter of 2022. In Kongsfjord, in the west of the archipelago, the researchers took water and sediment samples and then assigned the DNA they contained to various marine organisms. This enabled them – for the first time - to gain an overview of what goes on in these Arctic waters during the polar night. And that is an astonishing amount, as the team reports in a new study in the journal Marine Environmental Research.