The ship that wants to be stuck in ice

SCIENTISTS are to spend a year in a ship embedded in ice at the North Pole to study weather patterns.

Extreme weather and polar bears make it difficult for researchers to work in the region using snowmobiles.

But the £50million Mosaic project will send a Russian icebreaker, the RV Polarstern, into the Arctic in the summer. As winter draws in it will be frozen into the ice, which moves across the region.

This will allow scientists to spend time studying weather patterns without having to move heavy equipment around.

The co-leader of the project, Professor Markus Rex from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, Germany, told the American Association for Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Boston: ‘We can travel along the Siberian coast and then make our way with our icebreaker to the Siberian sector of the Arctic. Then we just stop the engines and drift with the sea ice.

‘As the season proceeds the sea ice will grow and by late November we’ll sit in solid sea ice. It will get colder; the ice will grow in extent and thickness.

‘By then we’ll have set up a network of stations on the ice. The whole thing will drift across the Arctic.’

Fifty institutions from 14 countries, including the UK, are taking part.