• Making the Arctic accessible for excellent science

    the capacities for marine-based research in the ice-covered Arctic Ocean. In the project “ARICE- Arctic Research Icebreaker Consortium”, they aim at better coordinating the existing polar research

  • An entire year trapped in the Arctic ice

    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

  • The Arctic is facing a decline in sea ice that might equal the negative record of 2012

    Arctic sea ice
    Sea ice physicists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), are anticipating that the sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean this summer may shrink to the record low of 2012. The scientists made this projection after evaluating current satellite data about the thickness of the ice cover. The data show that the arctic sea ice was already extraordinarily thin in the summer of 2015. Comparably little new ice formed during the past winter. Today Dr

  • MOSAiC aerial campaign: first aerial survey flights in the Arctic since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic

    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.

  • Oceanic microseisms

    Oceanic microseisms - formation, propagation and interaction with sea ice When waves break on the high seas or on the beach, they create [...] ice-going ocean-bottom seismometers (OBS) . These were deployed in ice-covered areas to investigate, for example, submarine volcanism and the [...] were also recorded, which we are currently analysing. Map of the Arctic and Antarctic. The red stars mark the oceanic microseisms research projects. (Graphic: Alfred-Wegener-Institut) Contact An ice-going

  • Oasis of life in the ice-covered central Arctic

    Polarstern Expedition
    Under the ice of the Arctic, unknown habitats conceal an unexpected variety of living beings. On October 23rd, 46 scientists are expected to return to the home port in Bremerhaven from an Arctic expedition with the research vessel Polarstern. Over the past six weeks, they had explored life in ice, ocean and seabed with new

  • Long-term Observations

    Long-term observations in the Arctic and Southern Ocean Arctic Ocean The Arctic is an environment where global climate change is strongly manifested. The Arctic Amplification, represented by the atmospheric warming trend in the Arctic being about three times that of the global average, is also manifested in sea-ice and… Find out more Southern Ocean The oceans are [...] to extract and store heat and CO2 from the atmosphere. Polar oceans are of particular Find out more

  • PPR_Arctic

    PhD Thesis Alexandra Cherkasheva 2009-2014 Arctic phytoplankton today deserve special attention as they are already living in waters with most prominent climate change effect, which [...] recommended to use remote sensing data alone, as the satellite ocean color algorithms are known to perform poorly at polar latitudes even if developed explicitly for the Arctic waters. Gaps in satellite [...] Oceanic primary production: I. Adaptation of a spectral light-photosynthesis model in view of application to satellite chlorophyll observations

  • Ocean biogeochemical modelling

    Ocean Biogeochemical Modelling The biogeochemical modelling group aims at achieving an understanding of diverse feedbacks between [...] physiology (see Research ). We contribute to and coordinate the ocean carbon sink estimate in the Global Carbon Budget , particularly the ensemble of Global Ocean Biogeochemistry Models that includes [...] cycle and in the marine ecosystem, with a special interest in the Arctic and the Southern Oceans. Surface chloropyll a concentration in an eddy-resolving simulation (1 km horizontal resolution) in the Fram

  • Arctic Carbon Conveyor Belt Discovered

    Kara Seas could bind up to 3.6 million metric tons of CO 2 in the Arctic deep sea for millennia. In this region alone, a previously unknown transport route uses the biological carbon pump and ocean currents