A few crazy days here with no time to write. Full speed from the moment I wake to the moment I pass out…. Dead tired. Polarstern has this central double stair way…. Up, up, up…. Down, down, down. It’s pretty steep and is quite a trudge for tired legs. Our last days have been spent… Read More
A much more productive day. The bottleneck had been getting cargo off the ship and onto the ice, so I took over the coordination of that today, and it really helped to have a scientific liaison to the crew to facilitate this process. The ship’s crew is great at their job, and can lift heavy… Read More
A bit of a frustrating day today, although perfect conditions outside. We have not had much organizational structure yet and this showed today. There was some planning, where we organized teams of volunteers to work on different tasks such as putting out power cable. But these teams did agreat job of completing their work and… Read More
Long day…. But big progress. Marcel and I flagged the planned power line path out to all of the major installations. Then, with such a beautiful day, we took the opportunity to use the helicopter to sling load some large power hubs out to the key “cities.” These are 700kg beasts! I can’t really believe… Read More
Today I took a team out to Met City area for a bit of group brainstorming on how to install the site. A bunch of ice thickness measurements later and I think we’ve found a slim path on how we can get all of our different installations fitted into a limited and challenging space. Using… Read More
Markus, Marcel Nicolaus (AWI scientist, co-lead of MOSAiC), and I went out to explore our new home. Traversing across the ridges form the ship over to the outer wall of the Fortress. Clearly more stability over there, about 200m from the ship. The exploration went well, and was so exciting. It’s like checking out a… Read More
The journey from our rendezvous with Akademic Federov was quick. A couple hours only. Coming back to our floe was exciting. Evening. Dark. Breaking through different types of ice. We were headed towards a waypoint on the navigation system, but this is hard business because the waypoint is based on ice maps that are some… Read More
We now have a decision. Overnight we moved the Polarstern and AkademicFederov together away from the floe and lifted key personnel from AkademicFederov over for a meeting to discuss collective findings. Science and ship leadership from both sides, sitting around a large circular table in Polarstern’s blue saloon. A sharing of results…. Diagrams, measurements, interpretations.… Read More
Day two of our exploration truly exhilarating (and not as debilitating!). We had a snow machine pulling a Nansen sled, which itself dragged a little radar-like system that measures the total ice thickness. Time for some surveys. With the snow machine we can simply cover more territory and build up statistics of the floe. Off… Read More
A long day on the ice, but these days are so important for the floe selection process. Exhausted. Fully. We arrived at a potential candidate floe…. People a bit concerned about the floe we already explored, and the news from AkademicFederov being more of the same. But this day has been useful. A bit slow… Read More
