by Matthew Shupe, CIRES/NOAA scientist and co-coordinator of MOSAiC

As quarantines go, it could be worse. Not that I’ve ever been in quarantine before.  But here I sit in a modern and spacious (by European standards) hotel room. Full sized bed. Couch. Working desk. And the best feature is a full wall of windows looking out the end of the room….. out over Bremerhaven, the Weser River, and out to the North Sea. Large ships sailing into port in the distance. The skyline of the Bremerhaven coastline. A canal with some ships moored to the docks. Cranes and wind turbines in the distance. And the daily flow of clouds coming in off the sea, bringing rains, reflecting colors of the day, controlling the lighting. Quite a mixture of the old and the new in my window scene. Bremerhaven is an old, important port city. When I lived in this area nearly 30 years ago it was run down…. In poor shape.  But now there seems to be some rejuvenation. Modern buildings. The big “sail” hotel, which looks like a huge sailboat, stands proudly on the waterfront looking out to the North Sea. AWI [the Alfred Wegener Institute] also has a modern-looking main building. We have some time here. Time to allow any nascent infections to reveal themselves. We are on a delicate path here. One that must all but eliminate the risk of us carrying the virus with us out to Polarstern. Thus, it takes these days of isolation, and the full cooperation of the whole team that is assembled here to head out into the Arctic ice and carry forward the banner of MOSAiC.