• Under Saharan Dust

      PS95.2 Weekly Report No. 1 | 9 till 15 November 2015
      After 13 days at sea Polarstern reached Las Palmas on the Canary Islands on the 10th November. The team of three geophysicists left the ship and

    • Record low sea ice cover in the Antarctic

      Southern Hemisphere continues until the end of February. The current expedition team on board RV Polarstern has just reported virtually ice-free conditions in its current research area, the Bellingshausen

    • An entire year trapped in the Arctic ice

      largest-scale Arctic research expedition of all time: in September 2019 the German research icebreaker Polarstern will depart from Tromsø, Norway and, once it has reached its destination, will spend the next year

    • This Evening Sees the Start of MOSAiC – the Greatest Arctic Research Expedition of All Time

      r a decade of preparations, it’s finally time: this evening at 8:30 p.m. the German icebreaker Polarstern will depart from the Norwegian port of Tromsø. Escorted by the Russian icebreaker Akademik Fedorov

    • Finally, we are let loose

      departed from Tromsø and enjoyed the marvellous weather. The sun was shining from a blue sky while POLARSTERN passed the fjords towards the North-Atlantic. Finally, we are let loose. In particular, the newbies

    • Uncharted island soon to appear on nautical charts

      the northwestern Weddell Sea in the Antarctic on board the Alfred Wegener Institute's icebreaker Polarstern since 8 February 2026. In this key region for global ocean currents, the focus has been on the

    • Locations and Facilities

      ___ Diving from RV Polarstern RV Polarstern (Photo: Alfred-Wegener-Institut) The research vessel Polarstern operates in the southern and arctic ocean. As an icebreaker RV Polarstern enables to enter ice [...] North Sea or the Atlantic from the RV Heincke . Dives from our larger research vessels (incl. RV Polarstern) are done using RHIB’S or inflatables according to the ESDP-guidelines „Scientific diving from [...] to conduct diving supported underwater research under ice shields. For further details about RV Polarstern click here . _________________________ Diving at the German Polar Station Neumayer III (Antarctica)

    • Giant sponge gardens discovered on seamounts in the Arctic deep sea

      Bremerhaven and Kiel and their international partners discovered this unique hotspot of life during a POLARSTERN expedition and now report their findings in the journal Nature Communications . They stress the

    • Why the tongue of the Pine Island Glacier suddenly shrank

      from its floating tongue. In February 2017, researchers on board the German research icebreaker Polarstern successfully mapped an area of seafloor previously covered by shelf ice. A comparison of these

    • Two New Records at the North Pole

      destination, and finally, at 12:20 pm (CET) on Friday, 28 February, dropped anchor 970 metres from Polarstern, moored to the same floe. While the handover is in full swing on the MOSAiC floe, in Russia another