• Two New Records at the North Pole

    MOSAiC
    For days, fast sea ice had slowed the progress of the resupply icebreaker Kapitan Dranitsyn; bound for the North Pole, her mission was to support the second exchange of researchers and crew in

  • Ice Ocean Dynamics

    export of sea ice and relatively fresh water through Fram Strait depend on these sea ice properties. A feedback loop connects oceanic heat transport, winds and sea ice transport in the Greenland Sea (Kovacs [...] of the Arctic Ocean. Such waters flow in from the Nordic Seas. An interchange of waters between the Arctic and the Nordic seas results in in sea saw fluctuations in fresh water content between the basins [...] water we employ ocean sea ice and large-scale Earth System models. The models are validated using sea ice drift estimates from satellite remote sensing and regional airborne sea ice thickness measurements

  • Arctic Amplification

    with a coupled ocean-sea ice model (North Atlantic Arctic Ocean Sea Ice Model, NAOSIM) show a destabilisation of the halocline due to increased freezing in polynyas of Arctic shelf seas. We are planning to [...] of the coupled atmosphere-sea ice-ocean system during different sea ice regimes as a function of spatially heterogeneous surface properties (e.g., albedo, temperature, sea ice, and snow thickness). These [...] global climate models. A focus will be the Barents Sea, where strong surface heat fluxes foster low sea level pressure and shallowdepth export of water and sea ice. The export is compensated for by a corresponding

  • Ten years of exploration with the AWI’s research aircraft Polar 5

    for atmospheric research and geophysics purposes, the airplane has landed on the Arctic sea ice near the North Pole, and at the South Pole.

  • From River Weser to the North Sea

    Wadden Sea National Park the participating researchers will use e.g. empirical and model-assisted analyses to discover how minute plastic particles (microplastics) make their way from land to sea, which [...] Microplastics
    Around the globe, the pollution of rivers, lakes and seas with plastic litter is on the rise. A new project jointly coordinated by the University of Bayreuth and the Alfred Wegener Institute

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

    between the atmosphere, ocean and sea ice, as well as on the ecosystem. Thanks to the collaboration between international experts, the one-year-long ice drift past the North Pole will take climate research

  • Anniversary in the far north

    ice-covered Fram Strait between Greenland and Svalbard, which they call their HAUSGARTEN. The deep-sea observatory is the first, and still the only one of its kind for year-round physical, chemical and

  • International Summer School

    Helgoland
    In the 18th Coastal Summer School 16 young scientists from nine nations visiting the North Sea island Helgoland for eleven days. The aim of the project is to deepen their knowledge of coastal

  • AWI Sustainability Guideline

    are also involved in basic research and data provision on marine conservation issues, including North Sea research, Antarctic research (CCAMLR), the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity [...] on the basis of integrated communication processes, and convert them into targeted products. The North Sea Office, the Climate Office or the Arctic Office play an important role in this. In return, research [...] Oslo-Paris Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic 4 HE LCOM - Helsinki Commission Baltic Sea Action Plan 5 SCAR - Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research

  • The last week at sea

    PS119 - Weekly Report No. 8 | 27 - 31 May 2019
    After our storm on last Friday, the sea only calmed down very slowly and station work was only possible with two CTD stations in the late night towards [...] made about 60 km to the West of the spreading centre on its flank. There, the seafloor is parted by North-South orientated, parallel faults covered by young sediment, and we discovered both in the sediments