News
Antarctic
Irreversible ocean warming threatens the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf
By the second half of this century, rising air temperatures above the Weddell Sea could set off a self-amplifying meltwater feedback cycle under the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf, ultimately causing the second-largest ice shelf in the Antarctic to shrink dramatically. Climate researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), recently made this prediction in a new study, which can be found in the latest issue of the Journal of Climate, released today. In the study, the researchers use an ice-ocean model created in Bremerhaven to decode the oceanographic and physical processes that could lead
Antarctica
Researchers unravel the drivers of large iceberg movement
When, in the foreseeable future, a tabular iceberg nearly seven times the size of Berlin breaks off the Larsen C Ice Shelf in the Antarctic, it will begin a journey, the course of which climate researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research can accurately predict. The researchers have now succeeded in modelling how Antarctic icebergs drift through the Southern Ocean, and in identifying the physical factors behind their movement and their melting. Which factors are most important tends to depend on the size of the iceberg in question. Their findings were recently released on the online
Satellite Remote Sensing
New satellite technology promises great progress for glacier research
Scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute are developing with experts from the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) a new satellite measurement method for the observation from space of the large ice masses of Greenland and the Antarctic. “Tandem-L” is the name of a new satellite radar system, which launched in the year 2022 could provide urgently needed data concerning the shrinkage of the ice sheets in both hemispheres. Concerning the construction of the radar and the launch of the satellite mission of the same name, the Science Council is to advise the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) at the end of November as part of