We went back to the L2 site in our distributed network. Helicopter ride as usual. Touchdown and then it is a flurry of activity offloading all the equipment out of the back with the rotors still going. Turbulent winds, snow blowing all around. Lifting out heavy boxes, safety gear, our toolkit. Once the helicopter lifts… Read More

It’s been so cold out lately, and windy. Makes it hard to work. I feel the need to cover my face full time now, and with that, it is a huge challenge to wear glasses; they just fog up right away and then are completely useless. So I often go without glasses, which works for… Read More

With all the ice movements and openings, travel across the ice becomes a big challenge. We have to hop from floe to floe to get to Met City, sometimes over ridges and sometimes across cracks. Today was especially challenging because there was fresh snow that had blown across everything, covering cracks and thin ice. Blowing… Read More

There are some interesting sounds out here. The wind howling, you can even hear the snow blowing along the surface with little tinkles. The pops of a new crack forming. Water lapping up against the side of an open lead. But today were some great sounds. The squeak of a ridge being formed. Sheets pressing… Read More

“Continuity” is a very important concept for MOSAiC. But it’s also a huge challenge in the current Arctic conditions. In the last week we’ve had so much ice movement, right out in front of the ship. We watched Met City move back and forth across the view from the bridge. Intermittently we are able to… Read More

The days fly by quickly now. The end of this leg is in sight and there is still so much to do and re-do! So it seems that the time speeds up. And the chaos has contributed to this feeling as well. Major ice dynamics running from the northwest to the southeast of us, across… Read More

I was startled by the phone call shortly after midnight. Trouble at Met City. Felix had just arrived on the bridge for his night watch from 12-4am. He always takes a look around camp when arriving for his duties. And there was no 30m mast. Simply gone. So I was roused from my sleep to… Read More

It started small, as they all do. About 1m across at the point where the spine road leads past Ocean City out towards Met City. The crack meandered and there were places to easily just step across. No major changes over the day. We went on with our daily work at Met City….. In the… Read More

Back on the 9th we had a bear around camp. He was chased away with snow machines and flares. And headed off to the north…. But then in the following day, just after we performed the major power system transplant on our L1 site, our L2 site failed. I examined all of the available information,… Read More

Our path so far has been an interesting one. The design of MOSAiC was to follow the Transpolar Drift, to follow in Nansen’s footsteps. With tons of modelling and observational analysis led by Thomas Krumpen, we selected our starting location and developed a reasonable idea of our projected or expected drift path for the year.… Read More