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

All of the ships have assembled and we’ve entered the fjord. It’s truly beautiful; mountains in every direction. Snow capped. Jagged. We’ve had some sunny days here, after many days of overcast and fog. The sun definitely lifts the spirits, and builds the excitement. Now we set in motion a multi-day plan that involves 5 ships and more than 200 people, many containers worth of cargo, two barges of fuel, and innumerable eggs. Longyearbyen in the distance with its colorful buildings stretching up into the foothills. Little cabins over on the other side of the fjord. Snow fields extending down to the water. Fortunately the conditions are calm…. And will hopefully stay this way so we can quickly make this transition and get on our way back to the ice where another transition continues to play out. We can track the ice using buoys that transmit their data via satellite. And the seasonal ice mass balance buoy at our L2 site continues to show how the warmth of the ocean below and the atmosphere above are converging in the middle of the ice, warming its core. Temperatures at one-meter depth within the ice are now up to -3C, which is only about 1 C colder than the melting point for the salty conditions encountered near the ice bottom. There remains some warmth in the upper ice as well, from the past week of cloudy conditions. But in the last couple days it looks like the atmosphere has cooled off a couple of degrees such that heat is no longer pouring in at the ice top. It’s a little dance of the spring melt transition as periodic pulses of warm air keep lifting the core ice temperature. Very close now to being in the full melt state.