13.04.2021
Carbon-Hotspots in the Baltic Sea
Marine plants such as seagrass meadows, mangrove forests and salt marshes sequester large amounts of carbon in the sea floor. In the German Baltic Sea, for example, seagrass meadows currently store around 3 to 12 megatons. This is significantly more than was previously known, as the first results from Dr. Angela Stevenson from GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel show.
Further press releases from Helmholtz
27.03.2023
Less Sea Ice, More Herring
Every year, the waters of the polar regions are still covered by sheets of ice for weeks or months on end. But this sea ice is increasingly disappearing due to climate change. A glimpse into our…
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09.03.2023
Portrait of UFZ geoecologist Dr Christin Müller
The geoecologist Christin Müller studies hydrological extremes such as droughts and floods. Through high-resolution monitoring, she wants to help improve models and forecasts. Her research focus is…
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27.02.2023
How eddies affect our climate
The ocean has a large effect on our planet’s climate. In this regard, mesoscale – i.e., medium-sized – eddies, which constitute essentially the weather on the ocean, could be far more important than…
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10.02.2023
Record low sea ice cover in the Antarctic
There is currently less sea ice in the Antarctic than at any time in the forty years since the beginning of satellite observation: in early February 2023, only 2.20 million square kilometres of the…
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07.02.2023
UFZ Hydrogeologist Dr. Christian Siebert in portrait
Christian Siebert is calculating groundwater resources on a national level in Germany and how much water will be available in the future - taking both climatic and societal changes into account.
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07.02.2023
Plastic debris in the Arctic comes from all around the world – including Germany
“Citizen Science” gives interested citizens the chance to actively engage in scientific research. A citizen-science project conducted by AWI in the Arctic now shows just how successful this can be…
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03.02.2023
Polar sounds: Remixing the sounds of the Arctic and Antarctic seas
Since late summer last year, 50 sound clips from the Arctic and Antarctic seas have been made available for sound artists and musicians from all over the world to creatively reinterpret. On Monday,…
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01.02.2023
Beyond EPICA: reached a depth of 808 meters in the Antarctic ice sheet
The second drilling campaign of Beyond EPICA - Oldest Ice has been successfully completed. The international research project is funded by the European Commission with 11 million euros and…
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24.01.2023
Relaunch of the Sea Ice Portal: more intuitive layout and new features
Sea ice plays a central part in the Earth system: it cools our planet, shapes ocean currents, and offers a habitat for countless species. Yet climate change is causing sea ice in the polar regions to…
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18.01.2023
Global Warming Reaches Central Greenland
A temperature reconstruction from ice cores of the past 1,000 years reveals that today’s warming in central-north Greenland is surprisingly pronounced. The most recent decade surveyed in a study, the…
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03.01.2023
Fewer moths, more flies
A new study by researchers from Halle and Leipzig, who compared historical and current data from Finland, shows that the complex relationships between plants and their pollinators have changed…
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08.12.2022
Polarstern Turns 40
9 December 2022 marks the 40th anniversary of the research icebreaker Polarstern’s commissioning. Built by a consortium combining the shipyards Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft in Kiel and Werft…
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05.12.2022
Short-lived Ice Streams
Major ice streams can shut down, shifting rapid ice transport to other parts of the ice sheet, within a few thousand years. This was determined in reconstructions of two ice streams, based on ice…
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01.12.2022
Biodiversity Summit in Montreal
From December 7-19, 196 nations will meet to determine a new global biodiversity framework. In addition to species and nature conservation, climate protection is also being discussed, because the two…
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21.11.2022
Arctic Carbon Conveyor Belt Discovered
Every year, the cross-shelf transport of carbon-rich particles from the Barents and Kara Seas could bind up to 3.6 million metric tons of CO2 in the Arctic deep sea for millennia. In this region…
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11.11.2022
Researching the environmental impacts of deep-seabed mining
To what extent does polymetallic nodule mining impact the ecosystem in the deep sea? This is what the MiningImpact expedition SO295 with the research vessel SONNE is investigating for the next two…
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10.11.2022
Ranking of the main drivers of global biodiversity and habitat loss
The conversion of natural forests and grasslands to intensive agriculture and livestock is the biggest cause of global biodiversity loss. This is the main result of an study led by researchers from…
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03.11.2022
Antje Boetius once again appointed Director of the Alfred Wegener Institute
Polar researcher and deep-sea biologist Antje Boetius will head the Alfred Wegener Institute, which she has coordinated since November 2017, for another five years. In her first term as Director, she…
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01.11.2022
Full Speed Ahead for Climate-friendly Coastal Research
Today, German Federal Minister of Education and Research Bettina Stark-Watzinger christened the Alfred Wegener Institute’s new research vessel Uthörn at the Fassmer shipyards in Berne. The new ship,…
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17.10.2022
Antje Boetius and Markus Rex accept Arctic Circle Prize
The Alfred Wegener Institute and the MOSAiC research expedition were awarded the Arctic Circle Prize on Saturday, 15 October 2022 in Reykjavik. With the prize, the international organisation Arctic…
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05.10.2022
Arctic Ocean: Greater Future acidification in summer
Over the past 200 years, our planet’s oceans have absorbed more than a quarter of all anthropogenic carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As a result, their acidity has increased by nearly 30 percent…
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14.09.2022
New Method Makes It Possible to Measure Arctic Sea-ice Thickness, Even in Summer
Over the past several decades, the Arctic has warmed much faster than the rest of the world. With consequences for its sea ice. In order to gauge the thickness of ice masses in the North Pole region,…
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31.08.2022
Emperor Penguins Live up to 600 Kilometres Farther North than Previously Assumed
Before they reach the age of one, young emperor penguins from Atka Bay, near the German Neumayer Station III in the Antarctic, swim far north, beyond the 50th parallel south. Consequently, the…
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29.08.2022
Floating Summer School
On 30 August, 14 young investigators from around the globe will depart from Bremerhaven, bound for Cape Town. During the cruise, known as the North South Atlantic Training Transect, they’ll gain…
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23.08.2022
Vital Ventilation
Dying reefs and once-vibrant corals that have since lost all colour: climate change is having massive effects on the architects of undersea cities. As waters grow warmer, the phenomenon of “coral…
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18.08.2022
Noise affects life on the seafloor
Oceans have their own unique soundscape. Many marine organisms, for example, use sound for echolocation, navigation or communication with conspecifics. In recent decades, however, more and more…
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16.08.2022
Polarstern Returns to Bremerhaven
The Research Vessel Polarstern was in the Arctic for the past seven weeks. There, the summertime sea-ice extent declined by ca. 40 percent over the past 40 years – making it one of the most visible…
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15.07.2022
Sustainable collaboration: Using the AWI’s polar aircraft in the Harz
In Germany, the Harz is a region particularly hard hit by climate change: storms, arid conditions and subsequent bark beetle infestations are causing unprecedented damage to the forest. Sea-ice…
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07.07.2022
150 Whales Observed Feeding Together
After blue whales, fin whales are the largest whales in the world – and human beings have hunted both species to near-extinction. After the ban on commercial whaling in 1976, the stocks of these long…
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29.06.2022
Thawing Permafrost is Shaping the Global Climate
How is climate change affecting the permanently frozen soils of the Arctic? What will the consequences be for the global climate, human beings, and ecosystems? And what can be done to stop it? In the…
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