After 13 months at sea, the Polarstern has docked in Germany. Here is what was discovered during the largest expedition ever conducted in the Arctic.
The largest expedition ever conducted in the Arctic Circle has returned, after 13 months of work. Having departed on 20 September 2019 from the port of the Norwegian city of Tromsø, the scientific research vessel Polarstern docked on 12 October, in the early hours of the morning, in Germany. Bringing with it an immense wealth of work, experiments and data collection. So much so that it will take between one and two years to analyse it all.
The scientists endured long months without a sunrise, temperatures that reached -39.5 degrees Celsius and around sixty visits from polar bears. All of this during 389 days aboard the icebreaker belonging to the German Alfred Wegener Institute.
"They're back, my heart is pounding," declared Antje Boetius, director of the research centre, as the sirens of the Polarstern ready to dock rang out in the port of Bremerhaven, overlooking the North Sea. But beyond the joy of seeing the crew again, the atmosphere among the members of the international Mosaic expedition (Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate, that is, a multidisciplinary drifting observatory for the study of Arctic climate) was far from euphoric.
Over the course of the year spent crossing the Arctic waters, the scientists were able to witness first-hand the dramatic effects of climate change. "We observed the ice cap dying," commented the mission leader, climatologist Markus Rex. According to whom, "if we continue in this direction, within a few decades we will see an Arctic Ocean completely free of ice during the summer seasons."
We watched the polar ice cap die
Markus Rex, Wildlx, Mosaic mission leader
The researchers spoke of a situation that was "striking. Even at the North Pole, we found melted ice, thinned, brittle," Rex added. He spoke of "stretches of liquid water as far as the eye could see, all the way to the horizon."
Likewise, in winter they recorded on average considerably warmer temperatures than those of recent decades. This was measured at the four scientific stations installed on the ice cap, during the mission, within a radius of 40 kilometres around the Polarstern.
Thanks to the instruments used, the scientists were able to collect more than 150 terabytes of data, as well as numerous ice and water samples. All of this with the aim of understanding the reasons why the pace of climate change in the Arctic appears to be twice as fast as the (already alarming) global average.
"We believe we have managed to penetrate the understanding of the Arctic climate system," Rex declared. The mission studied not only the atmosphere, but also the ocean, the ice cap and the entire polar ecosystem. At the end of the analysis, the aim is to obtain models capable of predicting the evolution of the climate with greater accuracy, in order to determine what will await us in 50 or 100 years' time.
