Glaciers and Ice Sheets

Melting ice – flooded shores

Which islands and coastal regions of our planet will remain inhabitable in the future primarily depends on the intensity of ice mass loss in Greenland and the Antarctic. AWI researchers are currently using satellites to determine the status of these ice sheets
Now we have the perfect prescription

With the aid of our new ultra-wideband ice radar, AWI glaciologists can scan glaciers and ice sheets from top to bottom. Angelika Humbert and Tobias Binder explain how this technology works
E-mails from the Filchner Ice Shelf

The fate of our world’s coasts will be decided in the Antarctic, where huge ice shelves have to date prevented gigantic inland ice masses from pouring into the ocean and raising the sea level. AWI researchers have placed instruments directly below the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf
Greenland's Ice Conveyor Belt

To better understand the ice flows scientists drill through an ice stream for the first time - with the aid of a pioneering ice camp and methods.

Greenland

Ice really is a hot commodity

AWI glaciologist Ilka Weikusat talks about drilling through a fast-flowing Greenland ice stream for...

Infografik: Vergleich der Meereisbildung und Strömungsverhältnisse vor und unter dem Filchner-Ronne-Schelfeis heute und in der Zukunft

Oceanography

How warm water masses threaten the ice...

How the ocean‘s heat is threatening the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf

Die Heißwasser-Bohrung durch das Filchner-Schelfeis läuft und darf bis zum Durchbruch nicht unterbrochen werden. Anderenfalls gefriert das Wasser in den Leitungen und Rohren sofort.

Glaciology

How hot-water drilling works

How do scientists drill through the ice shelf which is 900 metres deep? With very hot water!

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