Last month, hundreds of researchers from all over the world started the largest-ever Arctic
expedition aboard a ship just over 500 kilometers from the North Pole. What makes this project
even more unique is that the entire ship will be frozen, embedded in sea ice for an entire
year. So it begs the question, why are they even doing this?
For starters, it’s the most ambitious climate change expedition ever attempted of the Arctic.
The Multidisciplinary Drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate, or MOSAiC,
will be studying the effects of a warming climate on the central Arctic’s atmosphere,
ice, ocean, and ecosystems. By drifting with the ice for a year, the team will be able
to collect the necessary information to create better climate models to help inform what
the Arctic will look like as it continues to warm.
“For us, there are a number of knowns and unknowns. The knowns are that we are going
out to the Arctic with all kinds of instrumentation, more than there’s ever been on a ship before
out in the Arctic. We know we’re going to get a lot of first measurements of many types
of data. It’s our first look at things like winter time aerosol properties, first look at like
scanning cloud radar measurements. Then there's a lot of unknowns, and those are really related
to the conditions that we're going to encounter there. So the sea ice, we’re really at the
mercy of the sea ice.” When they arrived at their destination, the
German icebreaker, called Polarstern, chose the perfect ice floe to attach itself to,
a crucial part of this mission since the ice needs to withstand the weight of heavy instruments.
This ice floe will serve as the so-called ‘ice camp’ for the expedition’s experiments
and a landing strip for research planes. Once frozen in place, the scientists will have
to set up camp quickly, as winter is coming for roughly 150 days, and come November, they'll
be operating in complete darkness. And that is when nature takes over. Drifting
at about 7 km per day, the frozen ship hopes to follow the path taken by ice floes along
a phenomenon called the transpolar drift. This path will allow the ship to drift from
the pole and move south towards the Fram Strait, located east of Greenland, where the expedition
will come to a close. The ship will have about 100 people aboard
at a time. It will be frozen in place, in complete darkness, while research continues.
And the Polarstern will be at the center of most of MOSAiC’s research, containing
laboratories and technical equipment onboard to take measurements and observe the environment.
At the base camp, experiments will be divided into different hubs like ROV City, which will
use remotely operated vehicles to observe marine organisms and collect water samples
from beneath the ice. Or MET city which will measure the composition of the atmosphere
using tethered balloons, which will continuously float 2 km above the camp. On top of all the
research, the Polarstern will have a distributed network of observational sites operating within
a 50 km radius of the ship, which will be equipped with remote and autonomous sensors
to collect additional oceanic, ice, and atmospheric data.
“At the end of our year in the Arctic, we’re going to learn a lot about the new Arctic system. With thinner sea ice,
with the interactions that are adapting themselves to the change, we’re going
to learn a lot about how the Arctic is manifesting.” And in the spirit of collaboration, the researchers
will upload their information to a database, making it accessible to their hundreds of
MOSAiC colleagues worldwide. So we’ll just have to wait and see the anticipated results
of this expedition that could help us better map the future of our planet.
Are there any other scientific expeditions that you’d like to see us cover, let us
know down in the comments. Make sure to subscribe to Seeker and thanks for watching.