Year Long Arctic Expedition to Rely on Current Drift

British researchers will be joining up to 600 other scientists and crew from 17 countries on board the German vessel RV Polarstern, when the ship is deliberately lodged into sea ice to drift past the North Pole during one of the biggest Arctic research expeditions ever planned. Spearheaded by Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), the €120 million Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) will be aiming to answer some of the biggest scientific questions about the Arctic which is warming twice as fast as the global average.

The UK’s NERC has awarded grants worth £1·8 million to six research proposals that will each utilise a two-month berth on the120m ice-breaker which due to set course started currently moving across the central Arctic Ocean between September 2019 and September 2020.

NERC Associate Director of Research Ned Garnett said: “We know that the dramatic changes in the Arctic climate system and the rapid decline in the extent of Arctic sea ice in summer has a major impact on our global climate. However, we don't yet adequately understand this warming process and a lack of year-round observations in the central Arctic makes predicting future changes in the area very challenging. This gap in our understanding of the Arctic climate is one of the most pressing problems in predicting global climate change.”

Coordinator of the MOSAiC project, Professor Markus Rex, Head of Atmospheric Research at the Alfred Wegener Institute, said: “What happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic. The climate development in our latitudes greatly depends on what weather the Arctic 'cooks up'. We now need to take a closer look and explore the interactions between the atmosphere, ice and ocean there. The dramatic scale of Arctic warming isn't adequately reflected in today's climate models and the uncertainties in climate prognoses for the Arctic are enormous. That's why we have to comprehensively study the processes involved in the climate system, especially in the winter.”

The MOSAiC project has been designed under the umbrella of the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC), led by the AWI, Russian Arctic & Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) and the University of Colorado (CIRES). The budget for the expedition has been contributed by all of the international partners involved, but chiefly by the Helmholtz Association, which means 90% came from Germany's Federal Ministry of Education & Research (BMBF).