News overview

An expedition report by Dr Stefanie Arndt

This May, the sea ice in the Arctic showed average development compared to the past several years. Not until the end of the month did the sea-ice extent substantially decline.

RV Polarstern is equipped with various marine radar systems. During the MOSAiC expedition, one of these systems’ antennas took a new picture every minute, offering exciting insights into the dynamics of the ice pack in the ship’s immediate vicinity.

After taking part in a several-hour-long search operation in the Arctic, Martin Schiller developed FloeNavi, a system for navigating and locating measuring sites on sea ice.

The seasonal maximum sea-ice extent in the Arctic has come and gone, the sun now rises above the horizon again at the North Pole, and the long Polar Night has come to an end.

The story of a thermistor buoy installed in the Arctic on 14.09.2018 and arrived in Bremerhaven on 01.03.2021, exactly 900 days after being installed on the ice.

The end of February also marked the end of the meteorological winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and of the meteorological summer in the Southern Hemisphere, which means the annual cycle continued with the spring / autumn. In this way, the seasons divide the year into…

Continuous datasets from the polar regions are valuable witnesses of the climate change. An example is the comprehensively compare and combine of in-situ buoy data, the remote sensing data on sea-ice movement, and the reanalysis data from the ECMW.

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.

One year, one floe – sea-ice research to the extreme!