Sea ice and snow cover experts support global climate study
Dartmouth College
HANOVER, N.H. – September 20, 2019 – Dartmouth experts on Arctic sea ice and snow cover are taking part in what is billed as the “largest polar expedition in history.” The year-long, multinational Arctic expedition began today when a German icebreaker, the Polarstern, set sail from Tromsø, Norway.
Beyond simply cruising across the Arctic over the next year, the Polarstern will intentionally lock itself into the Arctic ice. Once frozen into the ice, the icebreaker will drift with the floe as it tracks across the ocean to study the health of the high Arctic.
The “Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate” (MOSAiC) expedition marks the first time a modern research icebreaker will be set to drift in the Arctic for an entire year. The path of the drift is expected to allow scientists to comprehensively investigate the region, including by observing the Arctic winter in the vicinity of the North Pole.
“The threats posed to the planet from global climate change are real and they are coming on fast,” said Donald Perovich, a professor at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering and the expedition’s co-lead for sea ice research. “Hopefully, this study will be historic not only for its scale, but for its ability to allow us to understand the causes and consequences of changes in the Arctic.”
Focused planning for the MOSAiC expedition began about a decade ago. Climate processes in the central Arctic that will be studied in the research form a missing piece in the puzzle that is needed to better understand global climate change.
“After over ten years of planning, this research mission could not come at a more important time. The impacts of climate change are amplified in the Arctic, so this could be our best shot to explore the region while there is still time to assess and respond to change,” said Perovich, a member of the expedition’s project board.
MOSAiC is led by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). According to the organizer, the expedition’s rotating crews of researchers and support teams will gather data on the Arctic atmosphere, sea ice, ocean, ecosystems and biogeochemistry “in order to gain insights into the interactions that shape the Arctic climate and life in the Arctic Ocean.”
During the year-long expedition, nearly 300 researchers from 17 countries will rotate aboard the Polarstern. The project will deploy an international fleet of four icebreakers as well as helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft to support the research. In total, the expedition will include 600 international participants and cost about $155 million.
“The uncertainties in our climate models are nowhere bigger than in the Arctic,” said Markus Rex, head of MOSAiC and an atmospheric physics expert from the Alfred Wegener Institute. “There aren’t any reliable prognoses of how the Arctic climate will develop further or what that will mean for our weather. Our mission is to change that.”
Dartmouth researchers participating in MOSAiC include Perovich, Thayer graduate students Ian Raphael and David Clemens-Sewall, as well as Christopher Polashenski, an adjunct assistant professor at Thayer and a research geophysicist at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL).
“Due to logistical and scientific constraints there is much we don’t know about processes in the Arctic,” said Clemens-Sewall. “The multidisciplinary approach and superior logistical support will enable us to learn more about the Arctic and help us predict future climate change.”
Perovich, Clemens-Sewall and Polashenski will sail on later legs of the expedition. Raphael will join the Polarstern for a second time in August 2020 for the expedition’s final leg.
“MOSAiC is so critical because the sheer volume of data that we will collect simply isn’t feasible any other way,” said Raphael, who will research ice growth and the melting of sea ice. “We already know that the climate is rapidly changing, and we have enough data to understand why. We desperately need structural change, and that starts with evidence that can’t be ignored.”
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In addition to the Dartmouth team, countries represented in the expedition include Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. The ship-based teams will be supported on land by researchers from Austria and South Korea.
For more information on the MOSAiC Arctic expedition: https://www.mosaic-expedition.org/
The MOSAiC web app tracks the Polarstern’s drift route live: follow.mosaic-expedition.org
Follow MOSAiC and the Dartmouth researchers on social media:
Twitter: @MOSAiCArctic (#MOSAiCexpedition #Arctic #icedrift)
Instagram: @mosaic_expedition (#MOSAiCexpedition)
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I hope they know more about icebreaker hull strength than they do about the climate. Oh, actually, I do not. Few things would please me more than to see this “ship of fools” hoist by their own petard! I wonder if that Australian foolish academic will join this one, and again prove that he does not understand the weather!
Which one? We have a few you know.
I’ve no doubt whatsoever that this behaviour lies somewhere on a psychological Lorenz attractor.
We get these breathless press releases that imply that something has never been done before. Actually, people have been doing this for more than a century, starting with Nansen in the late 1800s. The Soviets/Russians have had floating ice stations more or less continuously since 1937. link
It took the Fram over 3 years to transit the Arctic ice cap. Nansen left the ship on skis to try to reach the North Pole. As I recall neither he nor the ship actually made it to 90 degrees North. The ship made to through to Svalbard, and Nansen made it to Franz Josef Land. Both the ship and Nansen and his companion were gone 3 years, without reprovisioning.
We hear about the heroic exploits of British explorers like Scott and Franklin. We don’t hear about the heroic exploits of Amundsen and Nansen and a host of other Scandinavians because they knew what they were doing and didn’t need to be heroic.
Roger. And this bunch will only be there a few months. What will they learn in one year?
Maybe there will be rapid warming in May.
If they are frozen in, will they get out in less than a year? There may be less ice, but I don’t think it is that much less. And the multi-year ice is in the cross Arctic current.
These are trained scientists. They will come back with the “truth”. Remember what Biden said.. “Truth over Facts”. That is be the motto of these learned people.
They have to dash to the North Pole to find the truth before it sinks to the bottom of the ocean due to global warming.
“Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate” (MOSAiC)…
…staffed by the Floating Arctic Research Team (FART).
LOL, that there is a good one, at least in my boat.
… from Unimaginably Naive Intelligensia Cannot Outwit Raw Nature Satisfactorily
Sounds like they are fully prepared to confirm what they believe. Bravo.
From the article:
“The threats posed to the planet from global climate change are real and they are coming on fast,” said Donald Perovich, a professor at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering and the expedition’s co-lead for sea ice research.”
And
“said Raphael, who will research ice growth and the melting of sea ice. “We already know that the climate is rapidly changing, and we have enough data to understand why.”
end excerpts
There are two unsubstantiated claims.
There is no evidence that human-caused climate change (that’s what they mean) is real , or is coming on fast, or is rapidly changing the arctic. The globe has been cooling for over three years. How is that “coming on fast”? The arctic has more sea ice now than in the past.
Alarmist climate scientists are prone to exaggeration and hyperbole. The above claims are a few examples of such. It seems that just about every human-caused climate change article/study has at least one example. It’s amazing to see how many scientists actually think it is a good idea to assert something as fact that they have never verified.
Somebody ought to give these scientists a class in “The Pitfalls of Assuming Too Much”.
The alarmist climate scientists are being led astray by assuming CO2 is the control knob of the climate when there is not one shred of evidence that this is the case. They just assume there is evidence without actually verifying it themselves.
They are depending on hear-say. They are appealing to authority. Unfortunately, the authority they appeal to in the case of human-caused climate change, is corrupt, and is creating a false reality where CO2 is an evil gas that is destroying the Earth’s atmosphere. Not true! Not true at all! No evidence of such! None! Yet climate scientists talk like there is. They are either being disengenuous or they are clueless Useful Idiots/True Believers.
Tom abbott… The biggest problem is that they are winning, they are everywhere, destroying peoples lives with “the world is going to end”.’ Anxiety and stress is not funny, in fact I went through it before finding this site… The scientists who have factual data on co2 not being the cause of weather changes, need to speak up and out, and fast, as the green tax scammers will win!! I absolutely dislike the protesters who live the same lives we do, yet want to destroy our society…
“The threats posed to the planet from global climate change are real and they are coming on fast,” said Donald Perovich”
So much for scientific objectivity.
Yes so any evidence to the contrary will. at least, be a “surprize”, if ever reported.
Er sorry, dut didn’t Amundsen do this over 100 years ago?
No, it was Nansen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fridtjof_Nansen#Fram_expedition
Maybe they’ll figure out that “ice” caused the Ice Age?
Maybe they’ll figure out that the the Arctic isn’t ice free like some proponents of CAGW said it should be several years ago?
Maybe they’ll admit they were wrong?
“Climate change is real, and it is coming on fast.” Where, exactly? In what ways, exactly? Temperature has remained fairly constant, or near it, for decades. I see this article consumed with scare tactics, not facts.
So the ship is to be “locked” into the ice. I do hope the ice floes between which the ship will rest don’t suddenly start to move: if the part north of the ship slides east, and the part south of the ship slides (let’s say) southwest, the entire vessel could suddenly be a demonstration of the power of millions of tons of ice, in oblique or contrary motion. [crunch!]
Good questions. Have you noticed that there is a considerable emphasis on it being “real” of late?
More and more people are doubting and thus the emphasis on the word real. Not sure what ‘coming fast’ implies. Do they mean it is not yet here, but soon will?
This has been before…by one man in a small sailboat. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/167520/north-to-the-night-by-alvah-simon/9780767904469/
I loved the book.
If the Ice in the Arctic isn`t melting fast enough to meet the climate change rhetoric there can only be one solution . . .
send a boat with a `thermal` engine in it for 365 days along with 300 bundles of flesh at body temp along with copious amounts of additional thermal energy to warm the air, heat the water, cook the food, make ice for the drinks, wash the clothes, play music over the tannoy, drive the computers and comms and radar systems, to allow phone calls to home, and to power the lights. Without mentioning the other thermal engine ice breakers running staff changes and supplies out, . . .
and then measure how fast the ice is melting !
new headline . . . percentage increase in annual CO2 emissions in the arctic sea ice area reach all time high !
Pretty sure the final report has already been written, and it starts with the words “It’s worse than we thought..”
Despite the enormous expenditures of fossil fuels to keep the people alive on the ice locked ship, and resupply missions, and swapping personnel, there is also a possibility of the ship’s hull being crushed instead of just lazily drifting about and going nowhere! Ice Breakers have reinforced BOWS, but relatively normal hulls. And resupply in total darkness will give rise to potentially catastrophic crashes, whichever type of aircraft they decide to use. There is nothing “friendly” about Arctic Winters!
Sssshhhh.. they probably don’t realize that night-time lasts for months up there.. let’s not spoil their surprise.. 😉
Just wondering what the “observer effect” will be on this.
I wonder whether the icebreaker is outfitted with a glass bottom so scientists will be able to study some of the previous expeditions.
“Climate processes in the central Arctic that will be studied in the research form a missing piece in the puzzle that is needed to better understand global climate change.”
Hang on a moment. The science is SETTLED. Damn it.
When this happened to Henry Hudson, it did not end well for him and his son.
All these projects start off with the answers. They want to gather the evidence to show why the Arctic Climate is changing so fast, not find out IF the Arctic is changing so fast. And to say the ice melted far faster than models calculated is total BS. The experts have been telling us the Arctic will be clear of summer ice by about 2009 and then every two years after that.
Ive had a life long interest in weather as a prairie boy and later remote territory worker (geolgical surveys and mining exploration) and Ive had reasonable success with forecasts. I predicted the bitter cold winter and cool summer this year in eastern and central Canada and I’m predicting another one as bad this year.
The last El Nino effects wore off a year and a half ago and NOAA’s modest forecast 2019-20 El Nino I predicted here on WUWT to be a bust when it came out earlier this year, simply because of the lack of warm water volume in the Eq. Pacific plus the unusual slanting equatorward of additional cold water from temperate zone “cold blobs”.
The final piece of the puzzle was the discovery a couple of weeks ago by a giant Russian nuclear “cruise icebreaker” taking wealthy adventurers on a trip to the North Pole, of extraordinarily thick solid pack ice from Svalbard all the way to the pole. Whereas Bremen and other ice thickness specialists were reporting 50 cm ice ( and still are!) The huge powerful ship had to bash its way throughout the entire transect through 3m and thicker packed ice of 100% ‘extent’. The icebreaker had to back up frequently to charge the ice and the voyage to two days longer than expected.
Chicago endured its coldest winter last season since records began in 1872. The cold air flowed down unimpeded from an Arctic basin registering over -50C at the time. My suspicions of much thicker ice than was being reported was confirmed by the Russian breaker. Present temperatures there have dropped to -15 to-20C (DMI temperature map). This 3m of ice is being preserved and will be added to by the coming very cold winter and should mark the unequivocal recovery of Arctic Ice extent and volume after a decade of marking time at the bottom of its earlier decline.
I wish everyone well on this expedition, but caution when winter takes a turn for the worse in the polar regions margins of safety are tdangerously thin. Don’t be careless.
If you’re wondering what’ll keep them warm and cook the food, also on board, four 14MW diesel engines.
Amundson on the Fram already did this over 100 years ago. So what is new.
Amundsen on the Fram already did this over 100 years ago. So what is new.
So 1890s.
So ….. gonna leave their part of the Arctic well fertilized ….
sanitation ? What sanitation .
😉
At least there will be no problems chilling the beer for the after-research-hour parties.