Beautiful and Forceful
Current position: 87° 32′ N, 17° 42′ E It’s the last week on the floe. We have drifted considerably south, about one degree. The sun is still 24 hours above the horizon, but we notice that the light becomes dimmer at night. There is a slight taste of winter already. Temperatures have dropped and are (…)
A normal day as a polar bear guard
Current position: 88° 38′ N, 44° 54′ E It is a normal day on Oden, me and Julia are working in the container checking the instruments and doing other routine operations when the phone rings. It is Ian, he wants to know if one of us could go outside to be their polar bear guard (…)
Excitement
Current position: 89° 25′ N, 62° 40′ O Bear and particles Surely about 100 years ago, in the times of Nansen and the like, embarking on a polar voyage was extremely exciting. Maps of the high Arctic basically did not exist, the time of return was uncertain as was the answer to the question whether (…)
Hunt for the ice floe
Current position: 89° 34′ N, 22° 43′ O One in a million After the deserved celebrations for reaching the North Pole it is time to go back to work again. We need to look for a good ice floe on which we can moor the ship and start our 5 weeks long station. One would (…)
North Pole
Current position: 89° 54′ N, 38° 32′ O It’s not exactly like cutting butter! It’s not exactly like cutting butter, the journey towards the North Pole. Since leaving the marginal ice zone late on 3 August, we have moved steadily further north in search of a “perfect” ice floe that will accommodate the needs of (…)
Start
Current position: 82° 12′ N, 10° 24′ O (marginal ice zone) Heading to the Marginal Ice Zone On 1 August, 15:00 CEST, we lift the anchor in the Fjord of Longyearbyen (78° N, 16° E) and set course to the north. Before the Oden starts rolling in the open ocean, it has a rather flat (…)
Mobilization
Current position: Helsingborg, Sweden – 56° 3′ N, 12° 42′ O What an intense week! In the past few days, about 14 different projects installed themselves on the icebreaker Oden. Cranes were moving equipment from the quayside to all decks, the project teams fitted out their labs and containers, and equipment was mounted to the (…)
Preparations for Leg 2
arrived in Tromsø on 23 November 2019 at two o’clock in the afternoon. It was dawn at that time and that was when I realized that I will not see the sun anymore for the next 3 months. I still need to get used to this thought. On November 27, I left Tromsø together with (…)
Polarstern and Akademik Federov at the floe
An image from above shows the two ice breakers Polarstern (left) and Akademic Federov (right) side by side to plan the set up of the floe. Our measurement container is sitting happily on the bow of Polarstern already acquiring data.
First News from Lauriane on Polarstern
They’ve always said, and somehow we knew, MOSAiC was going to be a different expedition. This is particularly true for communication. We’re literally dying for updates from Lauriane on Polarstern. We are eager to know how she is doing, how the situation is and how the data look like that we record. It’s a big (…)