Research and education
The Biological Institute Helgoland (BAH)

With modern methods of long-term data collection and in close cooperation with other institutions pursuing comparable research in the North Sea area but also supra-regionally, research on Helgoland will continue to be able to make a significant contribution to analyzing ecological changes and thus provide decision-making aids for resource management and environmental policy as a whole.
We want to make our research accessible to the next generation and to the interested public. To this end, AWI has established a school laboratory where school classes can experiment on the topics of biodiversity and climate change.
With the Bluehouse, the future project of the AWI with the community of Helgoland, a new exhibition venue is being created in which the research of the Alfred Wegener Institute and coastal research in the North Sea will be presented in a vivid and exciting way.

The Helgoland lobster used to be of great economic and also ecological importance for the island. For unknown reasons, the stocks declined dramatically a good 50 years ago and have not recovered to this day, despite some protective measures. In the Biological Institute Helgoland of the Alfred Wegener Institute, the life of the lobsters is researched and ways are sought to increase the natural stocks. In this way, the high biodiversity of the Helgoland rocky shelf is to be preserved. Work around the lobster will be carried out in the future by the company Reefauna.

Help for the lobster on Helgoland
Press article by Dietrich Mohaupt, Deutschlandfunk

Werner Karl Heisenberg

(* December 5, 1901 in Würzburg; † February 1, 1976 in Munich) was a German scientist and Nobel laureate who is one of the most important physicists of the 20th century. He gave the first mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics in 1925 and in 1927 formulated the Heisenberg uncertainty principle named after him, which makes one of the fundamental statements of quantum mechanics – namely, that certain measurands of a particle (such as its location and momentum) are not simultaneously determined with arbitrary precision.

Memorial stone for Werner Heisenberg on Helgoland

In June 1925, here on Helgoland, the 23-year-old Werner Heisenberg made a breakthrough in the formulation of quantum mechanics, the fundamental theory of the laws of nature in the atomic realm, which has profoundly influenced human thinking far beyond physics.

Report by FOCUS Online expert Ernst Peter Fischer from 16.02.2015 about the discovery of quantum mechanics