Visit: Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany

As part of our new DFF Research Project 1, Arctic seafloor carbon cycling under increased anthropogenic pressures, we recently visited the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Bremerhaven, Germany, to meet with our collaborators Frank Wenzhöfer and Felix Janssen.

The visit focused on integrating an aquatic eddy covariance system with AWI’s existing deep-sea landers and crawler platforms for upcoming research initiatives. Combining these technologies will allow us to extend high-resolution measurements of benthic oxygen exchange and carbon cycling into challenging deep-sea environments.

We came away very impressed by AWI’s research capabilities and the breadth of their deep-sea infrastructure, and we are excited to build further on this collaboration.

Our first joint opportunity will come this summer during an RV Polarstern expedition to the Molloy Deep in the Arctic Ocean, where we plan to test our instrumentation by integrating it with AWI lander systems.

We are looking forward to taking the next steps together and to developing new approaches for studying seafloor carbon cycling in the deep Arctic.