Content type

    • The pace at which the world’s permafrost soils are warming

      apparent scars in the world’s permafrost regions. As the new global comparative study conducted by the international permafrost network GTN-P shows, in all regions with permafrost soils the temperature of the

    • How Arctic lakes are accelerating climate change

      Permafrost
      In the future, climate change could abruptly increase the amount of methane released by lakes in the permafrost regions of the Arctic. The explanation: because of thawing permafrost, these

    • The sleeping giant is waking

      Permafrost
      For years now, scientists have been investigating how the gradual thawing of near-surface permafrost, which takes place in the uppermost layers of Arctic soils and in the course of decades [...] another phenomenon, which has only been sporadically investigated: the abrupt thawing of ice-rich permafrost, which can transform entire landscapes in only months of years through subsidence, the formation

    • Bubbling under the Arctic Seabed

      Permafrost
      The fate of permafrost - soil that is frozen for 2 or more years - is of huge importance for the global climate because of the large amounts of organic carbon stored in it, which can be released

    • Award for permafrost expert

      Prize for AWI scientist Ingmar Nitze: As part of this years Publication Award of the Leibniz Kolleg in Potsdam, the permafrost expert has been announced as a laureate. The yearly confered promotion supports young scientists of mathematics and natural sciences.

    • Permafrost comics awarded

      AWI scientist Michael Fritz receives this year's Potsdam Prize for Science Communication for the project "Es taut!: Frozen Ground Cartoons". The comics were created in cooperation with artists.

    • When the Arctic coast retreats, life in the shallow water areas drastically changes

      Coastal erosion in the Arctic
      The thawing and erosion of Arctic permafrost coasts has dramatically increased in the past years and the sea is now consuming more than 20 meters of land per year at some

    • German Arctic Office to act as consultant to politics and industry

      in the Arctic are no longer just the domain of scientists. The shrinking sea ice and collapsing permafrost coasts are now also becoming topics on the agenda of international politics and industry. To be

    • Coastal carbon sinks protect permafrost material from decomposition

      Permafrost
      The Arctic is warming more strongly than any other region on Earth, which leads to serious erosion of coasts where organic matter was frozen in the permafrost for thousands of years. Once

    • Increased greenhouse-gas emissions due to abrupt permafrost thaw

      Permafrost
      The permafrost regions of the Arctic, often referred to as nature’s iceboxes, contain tremendous amounts of carbon, mainly in the form of animal and vegetable matter accumulated in frozen [...] considered in permafrost emission estimates so far. As they report in the journal Nature Geoscience, abrupt thaw processes, which are possible in ca. five percent of all Arctic permafrost landscapes, could