Climate Research
The Arctic Ocean in summer will very likely be ice free before 2050, at least temporally. The efficacy of climate-protection measures will

, whole sections of coastline rapidly thaw, and erode into the Arctic Ocean. A new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters now shows that large amounts of carbon dioxide are potentially [...] being produced along these eroding permafrost coastlines in the Arctic.

cutting-edge technologies to create a jellyfish inventory for the Arctic Ocean. The group will receive financial support from the Helmholtz Association and the Alfred Wegener Institute.

MOSAiC Expedition
It could be the largest-scale Arctic research expedition of all time: in September 2019 the German research icebreaker Polarstern will depart from Tromsø, Norway and, [...] its destination, will spend the next year drifting through the Arctic Ocean, trapped in the ice. A total of 600 people from 17 countries, who will be supplied by other icebreakers and aircraft, will

. Under conditions of further warming and acidification of the ocean, Atlantic cod and its arctic relative polar cod would be forced to look for new habitats in the far north. Their populations could [...] disastrous, as the polar cod is the most important food source for Arctic seals and seabirds. In addition, fishers could lose the world’s most productive area for catching Atlantic cod, located to the north

Svalbard to conduct their first aerial survey flights over the Arctic this year. The flights, which will extend far into the Central Arctic, will support the investigation of the atmosphere and sea ice [...] agenda. Core research priorities include cloud formation over the Arctic Ocean and the question as to whether the sea ice observed during MOSAiC was generally thicker or thinner than in the past two decades, and how the unseasonably high summer temperatures affected Arctic ice cover.

Arctic Ocean
This summer the sea-ice cover on the Arctic Ocean shrank to the second-smallest extent since the beginning of satellite [...] soon melted again when the spring came. Secondly, this year the Arctic has seen extremely high air and water temperatures. Accordingly, heat gnawed away at the ice from both above and below, resulting

Sea Ice
The Arctic sea-ice extent is the lowest it’s ever been in July since the beginning of satellite observation. The sea-ice retreat is especially [...] Siberia and seriously impacted the sea-ice cover: in the Russian Arctic (the sector from 30 to 180° East), roughly 1 million square kilometres less of the ocean is covered with ice than in the past seven

navigation conditions through the Northern Sea Route. WP5 connects Arctic climate changes and sea ice decline evaluated in WP1-4 to biodiversity and biological productivity changes in the Arctic Ocean. WP5 [...] ocean-ice model and the state-of-the-art coupled atmosphere-ice-ocean regional climate model of the Arctic (HIRHAM-NAOSIM) with high [...] , W. Smethie, and R. Rember, (2018), Radium isotopes across the Arctic ocean show time scales of water mass ventilation and increasing shelf inputs, J. Geophys. Res. Oceans, doi:10.1029/2018JC013888

(AWI) have recently found higher amounts of microplastic in arctic sea ice than ever before. However, the majority of particles were microscopically small. The ice samples from five regions throughout the Arctic Ocean contained up to 12,000 microplastic particles per litre of sea ice. Further, the different types of plastic showed a unique [...] parts of the Arctic Ocean. The new study has just been released in the journal Nature Communications.