Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
ARCTIC ROLES
Team braves -40C to unlock secrets of climate change in the frozen North
and NADA FARHOUD AN intrepid team of 300 scientists spent a year in the Arctic to find the answers that will help us deal with the climate crisis.
Nowhere on the planet is global warming having a greater impact than at the polar ice caps, which are heating up at twice the rate of everywhere else.
The region could lose its summer sea ice as soon as 2050, which would cause a disastrous rise in global sea levels and massive interruption to our weather patterns.
The €145million MOSAIC project – dubbed “the modern climate science equivalent of going to the moon” – was funded by governments, businesses and academic institutions from 20 countries.
Its remit was to gather as much data as possible from the most inaccessible region of the globe in one go.
Amy Macfarlane, a 27-year-old snow physicist from Manchester, was among the scientists and researchers who were sent as deep into the Arctic sea ice as an icebreaker could penetrate.
The team was then left frozen in an ice floe to drift for a year while they recovered invaluable and previously unattainable data.
Amy and her colleagues braved brutal weather and possible polar bear attacks to search for the answers needed to transform our understanding of climate change before the sea ice is lost forever. Amy said: “At one point we were down to around -40C.
“You’re carrying heavy equipment and the clothing is also heavy.
“I was working on the ice, going out every day for almost eight months, so it really puts a lot of stress on your body.”
A film crew followed the expedition aboard
German icebreaker
Polarstern, which was 10 years in the planning. The documentary was then shown at the COP26 summit.
Amy explained how the team investigated the fate of sea ice, as well as the ocean and atmosphere system, for the first time. Worryingly, they found the ice was a lot thinner than expected.
Amy said: “We know the steps to take and how important it is to take them – it’s just how quickly we can put them into place. “What keeps me optimistic is that I think the motivation is there to do it.”