News

This page contains latest news regarding the institute. Some entries are only available in German.

30.01.2019

Raising data treasures with ODIN 2 by easily surfing through over 60 years of Baltic Sea monitoring

This year, the first international agreement on joint monitoring of the Baltic Sea marine environment turns 50: As early as 1969, the riparian states for the first time carried out measurements along a coordinated station network as part of a so-called “Baltic Year”. The Warnemünde oceanographers have been involved ever since and are making a significant contribution to this valuable long-term data set. Their more than 70 million data, some of them even dating back to 1951, are now freely accessible and can be visualised user-friendly with the ODIN 2 research tool developed by the IOW: https://odin2.io-warnemuende.de.

17.01.2019

Bad food?
How mesozooplankton reacts to blue-green algae blooms

A group of marine researchers around the IOW biologist Natalie Loick-Wilde has succeeded in deciphering the mysterious feeding behaviour of mesozooplankton in the presence of cyanobacterial blooms by analysing stable nitrogen isotopes in amino acids. They found that contradictory observations, according to which both the dominance of herbivorous and carnivorous diets occurred, can be explained by the aging process of a blue-green algal bloom. In view of an assumed future worldwide increase in such blooms, their findings open up new perspectives on potential developments within a key group of the marine food web.

14.01.2019

Model results: Baltic Sea could return to a good environmental status

In the largest model comparison ever carried out for the Baltic Sea region, an international team of authors led by Markus Meier, oceanographer from Warnemünde, came to the conclusion that a good status of the Baltic Sea environment can be achieved if the measures planned in the Baltic Sea Action Plan to reduce nutrient discharges are consistently implemented. They thus contradicted the view that climate change in general makes it impossible to achieve this goal. At the same time, however, they confirmed that climate change would lead to an increase in eutrophication if the nutrient load remains high.

07.01.2019

Is climate change a threat to marine ecosystems in the Benguela upwelling system? New project kicks off

The three-year research project EVAR to investigate possible climate change impacts on key biogeochemical processes in the Benguela upwelling system off South West Africa, a very important fishing ground, was launched on January 2, 2019. The project is funded by the German Ministry of Research with about 3 Mill. euros and is headed by the IOW. Scientists from the MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at Bremen University and the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel are also participating, together with their colleagues from the University of Namibia and the National Marine Information and Research Centre NatMIRC.

11.12.2018

New climate report for the Baltic Sea region (BACC III) underway

The Second Assessment of Climate Change in the Baltic Sea Region (BACC II) of 2015 is currently being updated by scientists from the international Baltic Earth network. As for the previous two BACC reports (2008, 2015), Baltic Earth experts from various research fields such as meteorology, hydrology, oceanography, biology and biogeochemistry will compile the updated report. Furthermore, there will again be a close cooperation with HELCOM (Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission - Helsinki Commission).

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Focus

Microplastics in the Sea

Alarming news about the growing littering of the seas and the omnipresence of microplastics trigger the public concern. Marine scientists are working with special emphasis to answer open questions related to this highly topical environmental issue. At the IOW, we investigate

• whether microplastics might serve as an ideal transportation vehicle for pathogenic germs

• how methods to determine microplastics, which today are still very time-consuming, can be improved

• which are the sources and pathways of microplastics into the sea.

Satellite image of the month

Mean Sea Surface Temperature of Baltic Sea on 25.03.2019 produced from data of NOAA- and MetOp weather satellites.