Press release

Southern Ocean
A unique series of measurements taken over several years in the Antarctic Ocean provide new findings about the daily vertical migration of zooplankton communities: scientists of the Thünen Institute of Sea Fisheries in Hamburg and the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven [...] mammal in the world, the blue whale.

of the water mass exchange since the Neogene, we know little about the early phases of the circulation. This will be the focus of future [...] and oceanographic changes in the southern Indian Ocean Located in a key region in the southern Indian Ocean the complex topography of the Kerguelen Plateau, one of [...] about 4000 km of high-resolution seismic reflection data were collected in the Labuan Basin west of William's Rudge and on the Southern

Fascinating discovery
Near the Filchner Ice Shelf in the south of the Antarctic Weddell Sea, a research team has found the world's largest fish breeding area known to date. A towed camera system photographed and filmed thousands of nests of icefish of the species Neopagetopsis ionah on the seabed. The density of the nests and the size of the entire breeding area suggest a total number of about 60 million icefish breeding at the time of observation. These findings provide support for the establishment of a Marine Protected

Southern Ocean
The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the planet’s most powerful and arguably most important. It is the only one to flow clear around the globe without getting diverted by any landmass, sending up to 150 times the flow of all the world’s rivers clockwise around the frozen [...] of years. But much is still not known about how it works, including how it might now respond to human-induced climate change.

mechanisms created by the Southern Ocean can the strength of glacial-interglacial temperature variations and their coupling to CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere be explained. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) The zonal transport of water masses in the Southern Ocean is brought about by the Antarctic [...] , the ACC to fill the deep basins of the world ocean. Nutrient rich The upwelling deep water in the Antarctic Divergence is rich in nutrients

much do humans contribute to today's climate change? This is one of research's central questions. To give a proper answer, we have to know the parameters of natural variability, e.g. the temperatures in oceans, above the continents and in polar regions. This necessitates considering the properties of the climate of the past. We are able to reconstruct [...] world. In our research we link past climates to environmental conditions of the future. This implies that we research the state of the

Antarctic Peninsula
During the era of commercial whaling, fin whales were hunted so intensively that only a small percentage of the population in the Southern Hemisphere survived, and even today, marine biologists know little about the life of the world’s second-largest whale. That makes the findings of researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz [...] . In view of this, the marine biologists call for protective measures for this important habitat so as not to jeopardise the apparent recovery of

UN Decade of Ocean Science Spotlight on the Ocean It’s a world full of riddles: though the ocean shapes the face of our ‘blue planet’, covering 70 [...] diverse experts in a network that investigates open research questions and develops solutions for the preservation and sustainable use of the ocean. Its motto: “The science we need for the ocean we [...] for the economic, social and cultural value of the ocean; the world of water is to become a source of fascination and inspiration for as many

Underwater acoustics
Four different types of killer whales live in the Southern Ocean. They are known to differ in feeding ecology and appearance. However, little is known about the distribution and behaviour of these different killer whale ecotypes. To answer these questions, scientists monitor the whales’ [...] underwater sound recorders. However, so far nobody knew, which calls the different ecotypes are using.