After more than a decade of planning and months spent floating in the Arctic, documenting hundreds of measurements and dodging more than a few polar bears, Boulder scientists and researchers from the historic MOSAiC expedition are back on dry land.
MOSAiC, which stands for Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate, was an international effort led by the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany with an ambitious goal: to freeze a research ship into the ice north of Siberia and spend a year drifting in the Arctic Ocean, gathering as much data about the surrounding environment as possible.
It was the largest expedition of its kind in history, with a $150 million price tag funded in part by the National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Department of Energy.
Matthew Shupe, senior research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Studies and NOAA, co-coordinated the expedition.
Shupe spent about six months on the icebreaker Polarstern over the course of the 13-month expedition, which began in September 2019 and ended in October.
Shupe was on the Polarstern for two three-month stints and was among hundreds of scientists from 20 countries who lived and worked on the ship.
Researchers gathered almost 900 different types of measurements during the expedition, and Shupe oversaw projects that were measuring 150 types of data, including a Department of Energy-backed effort to measure atmospheric radiation.
The data collected during the expedition will likely take the scientific community more than 10 years to analyze, Shupe said. The last time scientists embarked on a similar expedition in the Arctic was 22 years ago, and that data is still in use today.
“That’s one of the big motivators for MOSAiC,” Shupe said. “We know that data is great, but it’s from an Arctic that doesn’t exist anymore.”
Research has shown that the Arctic is warming at a rate faster than any other area on the planet and its ice is melting further during the summer than it ever has before.
Warm conditions, atypical atmospheric patterns and the coronavirus pandemic threw the MOSAiC team for several loops. The biggest surprise of the expedition, Shupe said, was how dynamic the ice was and how quickly it changed.
While the expedition’s original plan was to freeze the ship into ice and follow that ice throughout the entire year, the Arctic had a different idea. “We planned to be embedded in the middle of the ice for a whole year and by July had reached the ice edge,” Shupe said.
Expedition leaders used 12 years of data to pick the ideal location for where to freeze the ship. In the previous 12 years, nothing has happened like what happened this year, Shupe said.
“We thought we were setting ourselves up for success, and the Arctic said, ‘I’m not going to behave like that this year,” Shupe said, laughing.
After months of more ice breakage and faster movement than anticipated, the MOSAiC team packed up all of their instruments in late July in case the ice became even more unstable. Overnight, the floe that had held the ship captive broke into a thousand pieces.
“That itself was a unique opportunity, to follow this ice floe to the very end and to see it disintegrate in this amazing fashion,” Shupe said.
How quickly the ice changed over the expedition was also surprising to CU Boulder graduate student Gina Jozef.
Jozef was part of a research team flying drones to gather atmospheric measurements such as temperature, pressure, humidity and wind speed. She was scheduled to be on the Polarstern from late January to late April, but the coronavirus pandemic forced organizers to extend that leg of the trip by two months because airports were shut down.
“Even a week after arriving there were a ton of cracks opening up as we were trying to do our science,” she said. “I wouldn’t have expected that to happen so soon in the year, and sometimes it would get in the way of drone flights because a crack in the ice would open up between the ship and where our gear was.”
It was also surprising how quickly the ice moved, Jozef said. The drift was fast enough that Jozef and her colleagues had to adjust the drones’ autopilot settings so they would land where the researchers actually were, instead of the location from where the drones took off.
The changing nature of Arctic ice will likely inform research that’s born from the MOSAiC data, Shupe said. How does the dynamic ice pack influence energy transfer, gases and other atmospheric entities? What happens when the massive lid of Arctic ice is broken up? Those are questions that scientists will use MOSAiC data to grapple with for years to come.
The data also enables scientists to improve climate models and to look at whether they accurately represent what’s happening in the Arctic.
For Shupe, MOSAiC was a chance to see how a wide range of scientific disciplines can influence and benefit each other when they happen in tandem.
“It’s this whole notion of bigger picture science,” he said. “For me, the success of this research is way more than the success of my research. It’s the success of everyone’s research, even that which I might not understand.”
There were some gaps in data collection after the Polarstern had to leave its ice-locked home in order to change out crews in June and then head to the North Pole, another consequence of the pandemic and unexpected ice behavior. But in some sense, the MOSAiC expedition existed outside the realities of 2020.
Shupe and Jozef described living in the Arctic as an otherworldly experience, where ice sheets melt and transform into a patchwork of brilliant blue pools and polar bears use research equipment as a chew toy.
But returning home was also like returning to another world, Jozef said. When she left for the expedition, there were no face coverings, obsessive use of hand sanitizer or avoiding social gatherings for fear of contracting a deadly illness.
“We left the world in a way that was normal and we had always lived, and hearing about it changing while we were gone and having to come back and adapt to a new way of living — that was strange,” she said.
