Adrift in a melting Arctic
A multinational expedition will follow an ice floe as it drifts across the North Pole for a year, said journalist Sarah Kaplan in The scientists hope to better understand why Arctic ice is vanishing.
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TQIAGVIK, ALASKA— The scientists walk across a frozen Arctic Ocean, dark specks in a sea of white. Pale clouds loom low over the bundled figures. The wind sends ice crystals swirling around them, erasing their footprints.
Behind a large ice ridge, the group shelters from the subzero cold and 25 mph gusts to set up their experiment. They are learning to map an area’s topography by shooting lasers across the ice and snow. But even their machines seem disoriented by the whiteout conditions: The lasers bounce off whirling snowflakes before striking their targets. It’s yet another problem they must solve before the fall, when these scientists and several hundred others will launch the largest Arctic research expedition in history: a 12-month, $134 million, 17-nation effort to document climate change in the fastest-warming part of the globe.
Home base will be a massive German icebreaker, though the ship will spend only a few weeks under its own power. After reaching a remote part of the Siberian Arctic, the crew will cut the engine and wait for water to freeze around the vessel, entrapping it.
Then the ship—and everyone on it—will be adrift, at the mercy of the ice.
As Arctic ice vanishes, many scientists expect the steady stream of air that pushes weather across the Northern Hemisphere to wobble, producing periods of punishing cold, brutal heat waves, and disastrous floods. That’s already happening. The polar vortex that gripped the Midwest this winter, the fires in California, and lingering hurricanes such as Sandy and Florence are all thought to be domino effects of this instability. These scientists are racing against the changing planet to understand what’s happening—and what is yet to come.
If all goes according to plan, the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) will begin on Sept. 20—when the icebreaker
RV Polarstern sets out in search of an ice floe to which it can pin its fate. The ship will spend the next 12 months following that single floe through the central Arctic and across the North Pole—a 387-foot drifting research station inhabited by a rotating cast of some 300 meteorologists, biologists, oceanographers, and ice experts. Nearly every northern nation is in on the project. Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute, a polar research center, is providing the Polarstern and leading the expedition. Russia, China, and Sweden have all contributed resupply vessels. Japanese experts have built flux chambers to measure carbon that moves from the sea ice to the atmosphere, and a Swiss team has developed an apparatus for sampling snow. The National Science Foundation and other U.S. agencies are contributing more than $25 million in grants, equipment, and logistical support, making this one of the most expensive Arctic expeditions the NSF has ever funded.
About 60 people will be living and working on the Polarstern at any given moment; most have signed up for two-month stints, though a few may be on board for half the year or more. Virtually their only link to the rest of the world will be the ships and aircraft scheduled to arrive every 60 days—winter blizzards and stormy seas permitting—to switch out passengers and restock food and fuel.
Simply getting to the Polarstern can take as long as a month; participants joke that it’s easier to reach the International Space Station, 250 miles above the surface of Earth. The researchers will have no internet or phone service. They will work seven days a week, with free time granted only at the discretion of their research coordinators. Those on duty from December to February will never see the sun.
This is the only way to truly understand the far north, organizers say. There is no land here for a permanent research station, no open water to sail through.
Analyses of ice paths from previous years suggest that the ideal floe lies about 335 miles east of the North Pole. By the end of a year, it should deliver the Polarstern to open water somewhere between Greenland and the Svalbard archipelago in Norway.
A successful transpolar drift—one that didn’t kill nearly everyone on board—has been achieved just twice before: first by the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, in 1893, and a decade ago by the small crew of a privately owned sailing ship called the Tara. The Polarstern will be the first modern research vessel to spend an entire year at the northernmost place on the planet.
No voyage has been as urgent, says Dartmouth geophysicist Don Perovich, who will sail with Melinda Webster, a sea ice expert at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, on MOSAiC’s June-to-July leg.
The 68-year-old Perovich, a tall man with expressive eyebrows and an easy smile, first came to the Arctic in the 1970s. Then, the persistent cold at the top of the world was like the keystone in an arch: It helped stabilize Earth’s entire climate system.