• Thawing Permafrost is Shaping the Global Climate

      of experts led by Benjamin Abbott from Brigham Young University, USA and Jens Strauss from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam summarise the current state of knowledge on these questions. In addition

    • Salps fertilise the Southern Ocean more effectively than krill

      Scientific Publication
      Experts at the Alfred Wegener Institute have, for the first time, experimentally measured the release of iron from the fecal pellets of krill and salps under natural conditions

    • Several metre thick ice cocktail beneath coastal Antarctic sea ice

      Sea ice physics
      Sea ice physicists of the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) have developed a new method that allows them for the first time to efficiently determine the distribution and thickness of what

    • Alga of the Year 2016: Ice alga Melosira arctica – winner or loser of climate change?

      the most productive alga in this inhospitable world," says biologist Dr Klaus Valentin of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). He is a member of the Phycology

    • Loss of Diversity Near Melting Coastal Glaciers

      of which were recently published by experts from Argentina, Germany and Great Britain and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in a study in the journal Science

    • Plastic Credits May Worsen Plastic Problem

      Sangcheol Moon of the University of California Berkeley and including Melanie Bergmann from the Alfred Wegener Institute, shows in the journal One Earth that offsetting schemes such as plastic credits are

    • Lake on the 79°N Glacier is splitting the ice – leaving permanent changes

      surface is also playing an increasingly significant role. In a new study, researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute investigated how - caused by global warming - a 21 km 2 large meltwater lake formed

    • Shedding more light in the darkness and depths of the polar night

      that is exactly what a team headed up by Prof. Charlotte Havermans and Dr. Ayla Murray from the Alfred Wegener Institute undertook in the winter of 2022. In Kongsfjord, in the west of the archipelago, the

    • Formation of the Arctic Basin

      seafloor at the Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean (Photo: Alfred-Wegener-Institut)

    • Long-Term Observations in the Southern Ocean

      floats while drifting in open waters (wiggled segments) and under ice (linear segments). (Graphic: Alfred-Wegener-Institut) Along their tracks they collect profiles of temperature and salinity between 2000m [...] trajectory of a single float. Note the near-surface warming event in austral summer 2016/17 (Graphic: Alfred-Wegener-Institut) Mapping the temperature and salinity profiles of many floats to specific surfaces (e [...] entire time period from objective mapping of float data. (From Reeve et al., 2016) (Graphic: Alfred-Wegener-Institut) More advanced analysis techniques even allow quantities estimates the transports associated