MY YEAR ON CREAKING ICE
When you’re seated in front of the fire on Christmas Day, made merry by good food and drink, spare a thought for scientists enduring slightly less hospitable conditions.
A team of researchers spent a year on the icebreaker Polarstern, drifting with the sea ice in the Arctic to better understand changes taking place at the epicentre of the climate crisis.
The Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (thankfully shortened to MOSAiC) is the most ambitious research project ever carried out. Three hundred scientists plus crew navigated the most extreme conditions on the planet – not to mention coronavirus – to produce unprecedented amounts of information, the quality and quantity of which has never been measured so extensively.
MOSAiC co-coordinator Dr Matthew Shupe
