Latest Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online According to a new study from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the University of Kiel, and the Alfred Wegener Institute, age matters for Antarctic clams when it comes to adapting to the effects of climate change. The study, published in the journal Global Change Biology, provides new insights into the likely impact that predicted environmental change could have on the future of ocean biodiversity. The Antarctic clam (laturnula...

Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research Reliable information on the depth and floor structure of the Southern Ocean has so far been available for only few coastal regions of the Antarctic. An international team of scientists under the leadership of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, has for the first time succeeded in creating a digital map of the entire Antarctic seafloor. The International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean...

Studies confirm that twice as much marine debris is lying on the seabed today compared to ten years ago The sea bed in the Arctic deep sea is increasingly strewn with litter and plastic waste.  As reported in the advance online publication of the scientific journal Marine Pollution Bulletin by Dr. Melanie Bergmann, biologist and deep-sea expert at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association. The quantities of waste observed at the AWI deep-sea...

Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The Polarstern expedition has disconcerting news about our rapidly receding sea ice. The Polarstern, an ice-breaking research vessel, returned to the port of Bremerhaven two days ago. The Polarstern, operating on behalf of the Alfred Wegener Institute, was conducting research into the retreat of sea ice and the impact it will have on the Arctic Ocean and its ecosystems over the last two months. In all, 54 researchers and...

Why did the atmosphere contain so little carbon dioxide (CO2) during the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago? Why did it rise when the Earth's climate became warmer? Processes in the ocean are responsible for this, says a new study based on newly developed isotope measurements. This study has now been published in the scientific journal "Science" by scientists from the Universities of Bern and Grenoble and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association....

Global warming is having an effect on the dive behavior and search for food of southern elephant seals. Researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association cooperating in a joint study with biologists and oceanographers from the Universities of Pretoria and Cape Town have discovered that the seals dive deeper for food when in warmer water. The scientists attribute this behavior to the migration of prey to greater depths and now wish to...

Even if the current weather situation may seem to speak against it, the probability of cold winters with much snow in Central Europe rises when the Arctic is covered by less sea ice in summer. Scientists of the Research Unit Potsdam of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association have decrypted a mechanism in which a shrinking summertime sea ice cover changes the air pressure zones in the Arctic atmosphere and impacts our European winter weather....

Next week marks 100 years since Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole. As a team of scientists brave the Antarctic to validate data from ESA’s CryoSat mission, it’s hard to imagine what these first intrepid explorers would have thought of today’s advances in polar science. The remote and vast expanse of the Antarctic is arguably the most hostile environment on Earth – infamously claiming the lives of Captain Robert Scott and his party all those years ago in their fated race to the...

The end of the last ice age and the processes that led to the melting of the northern and southern ice sheets supply basic information on changes in our climate. Although the maximum size of the ice sheet in the northern hemisphere during the last ice age is relatively well known, there is little reliable data on the dimensions of the Antarctic ice sheet. A publication appearing in the journal “Science” on 1 December now furnishes indications that the two hemispheres attained their...

In the central Arctic the proportion of old, thick sea ice has declined significantly. Instead, the ice cover now largely consists of thin, one-year-old floes. This is one of the results that scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association brought back from the 26th Arctic expedition of the research vessel Polarstern. The ship arrived at its home port of Bremerhaven at about 7 o’clock this morning. Prior to that it had covered more...