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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the following paragraphs, the team from the first leg of the journey, which was dominated by thin sea ice, review the mission so far: despite extremely challenging conditions, they maintained a steady

floe: the sea ice in which the research vessel Polarstern is now drifting through the Arctic was formed off the coast of the archipelago, which separates the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea to the north [...] north of Siberia, in December 2018. Sediments, and even small pebbles and bivalves, were incorporated into the ice during the freezing process, which the on-going melting process has brought to light on