Current sea ice maps for Arctic and Antarctic

Latest Articles

Find older news in our archive....

MOSAiC - Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate

It was the largest-scale Arctic research expedition of all time: in September 2019 the German research icebreaker Polarstern departed from Tromsø, Norway and, once it has reached its destination, spent the next year drifting through the Arctic Ocean, trapped in the ice. A total of 600 people from 19 countries, who were supplied by other icebreakers and aircraft, will participated in the expedition – and several times that number of researchers will subsequently use the data gathered to take climate and ecosystem research to the next level. The mission will be spearheaded by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). More information about the expedition here.

With meereisportal.de we accompanied the MOSAiC expedition with sea-ice-related information and detailed ice maps, and reported on the initial findings. In the course of ten DriftStories, once a month we showcased experts from the expedition’s ICE Team and explored the backgrounds of their research areas. You can continue to find all DriftStories, which offer a closer look at the sea-ice-related work done on site and the relevance of their research for the MOSAIC expedition as a whole, here.

meereisportal.de has provided regular coverage of the MOSAiC expedition in the form of the Sea Ice Ticker. Though the main focus of the Ticker texts was on fieldwork conducted on all aspects of sea ice, we also explored other topics, especially with regard to new developments, milestones and findings in the context of the MOSAiC drift experiment. The Sea Ice Ticker texts were released once a week and can still be read here.

KIT’s “Atlas of Antarctic Sea Ice Motion” now added to the data and information portal meereisportal.de

8 March 2021
Continuous datasets from the polar regions are valuable witnesses of the climate change that has become increasingly apparent around the globe since the 1980s. These include data on sea-ice formation and dynamics in the Antarctic pack-ice belt. When the Federal Republic of Germany became a signing member of the Antarctic Treaty in 1979 and established the Georg-von-Neumayer Station, an Antarctic station operated year-round, the stage was set for gathering regular readings in this normally hard-to-access region. In this context the “Atlas of Antarctic Sea Ice Motion” was developed. The KIT’s Atlas of Antarctic Sea Ice Motion was subsequently prepared for its new role as a permanent resource available at the AWI’s meereisportal.de, which will also make it possible to combine it with other datasets from after 1998 in the future. Read more here...

Sea-ice Development in Both Polar Regions Largely Normal

15 February 2021
Following 2020, a year that managed to break a number of records in the Arctic, the new year has begun less spectacularly, as a closer examination of the months December and January shows. The current winter season in the Arctic is particularly influenced by the temperature anomaly, which in December produced temperatures up to 5°C above the long-term average for 1971 to 2000 in the Laptev Sea and Central Arctic, and over East Greenland and Northern Canada. The atmospheric circulation linked to this temperature pattern in January was dominated by high pressure over Siberia and low pressure over the northern North Atlantic and North Pacific. Read more here…

DriftStories from the Central Arctic – one year, one floe – sea-ice research to the extreme!

20 January 2021
Never before have experts had the chance to investigate the Arctic sea ice as comprehensively as on the international expedition MOSAiC, on board the research icebreaker Polarstern. For an entire year, the ship drifted with the ice through the Central Arctic; for an entire year, the men and women of MOSAiC used cutting-edge technologies to study every facet of the ice around them. They share the challenges they had to overcome, and what they learned at the polar hotspot of climate change, in the following ten DriftStories, which have now also been collected in the booklet “DriftStories from the Central Arctic”. Read more here ...