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
Today we explored a very big floe, probably the biggest spatially in the whole region. Could this be our home for the next year? Extensive coverage of what look like frozen over melt ponds. Many measurements of 30-50 cm ice. This is not what we came to the central Arctic to find; it will not… Read More
A couple of slow days…. Well, there is always something to do. We have a daunting task ahead of us. First finding the floe, then getting set up. Lots of discussion on the first of these with differing opinions. In the end it comes down to a balance between science drivers, which would push towards… Read More
Into the ice today. What a great feeling to be back here! It is always thrilling to cross the ice edge. Here it was very loose as the winds have been blowing “off ice” towards us for a couple of days. Little floes here and there with progressively more appearing on the horizon. And just… Read More
“Angular” and “transforming.” Amy Richman (a CU Boulder videography graduate student aboard) asked me today to describe the Arctic. Angular >>> so many facets of ice, surfaces, rays of light. Transforming because it is always evolving…. Melting, freezing, drifting, breaking, changing color. It is never the same, never static. Finding my way to a better… Read More
A day at sea now. Tired. Perhaps it is part of getting my sea legs, and perhaps it is part due to sleeping 9 hours last night. First long sleep in a long time. Turned in early after our launch. No socializing. Feeling a bit melancholy. I think I haven’t yet processed the concept of… Read More
