Thank you for this wonderful piece. It is so refreshing to read about smart, dedicated people instead of the ghastly Republicans whose only preoccupation is wrecking the environment and stuffing money in their pants.
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The last time in Geological History that new snow fell in the Arctic was the last Ice Age more than 20,000 years ago.Hmm.
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Brilliant photography. Eerie environment. Suggests a Netflix film, a drama ice-packed with fierce snow-blowing hazards, polar bears pawing the half-frozen guards, King Rex stroking his irritable subjects quaffing excessive homebrew, miscreants nightmared by sunlight deprivation needing lamp-thaw in the 90d tanning-box. Not for a minute could there be the peaceable kingdom
Rex croons, much less a fractious queendom upon a heaving, wrinkling piroueting stateless berg. Bravo!
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Even though the goal of the Polarstern is research, the expedition should not take place, due to emissions from the ship's engines. It is past time to just leave non-human habitat alone, and lessen human activity in all spheres.
7
A wonderful read as usual from the Times. Just what I needed after all the political malarkey that has been coming out of Washington DC.
I hope a documentary is made about this trip.
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Fascinating. But after reading this I'm looking forward to the luxury of a hot bath! Got chilly looking at the pictures, ha.
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Fantastic article and photos. I spent a year being fascinated with the artic and read a series of books on it: Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez and one by Sara Wheeler were favorites. Thank you NY Times--we need articles and pics like this!! Keep'em coming!
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I hope they are being very careful about screening visitors and replacement crews for the new corona virus.
4
If you lived here where winter lasts about 7 months a year and you are lucky to get about 100 frost free days to put in a garden you wouldn't go so gaga about being frozen in for 6 months. you can get almost the same thing here, all for free.
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@mike L, I feel light deprived in December even in Northern California, so i can’t even imagine how it is for northerners. Do you grow anything indoors, in your long winter?
1
I wonder how they decide what are the waking and sleeping hours. I hope they have a good sauna too.
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Don't think it's warming up too fast where they are. Stuck fast in ice since September!!
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The interviewer asked about conflicts aboard, but avoided asking what I bet a lot of people want to know: are there affairs? But of course you can’t ask. I’m just thinking, it’s cold and dark and people are stuck in close quarters, so, you know.
Another thing I was waiting to hear is how they manage the ship’s waste, both sewage and solid. I assume the sewage is dumped overboard. I hope it gets at least some primary treatment before that. Two months of solid waste from food prep and other functions of daily life is a huge amount of garbage. If they are studying climate change, it would be heartbreaking to learn that they were blatantly disrespecting the planet.
I was on a so-called green cruise for about 10 days, and noticed them dumping waste overboard. When I challenged the business owner on that, after I left the ship, they ignored me. The ship’s engineer said they were allowed to dump sewage, after a primary filtering, behind X number of miles from shore. But I saw them dumping unfiltered laundry wastewater (suds), so I was doubtful about the filtering of toilet waste. And we were hugging the shore for the entire cruise, so were never the required distance from land. Ever.
Shipping is a dirty business. Clean cruising is a fiction. Don’t buy the story that your eco cruise to wherever to admire the natural world (look at all that endangered wildlife!) isn’t killing the very thing you are paying so much to see.
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All modern commercial ships have sewage treatment plants that are relatively efficient when operated properly. Cruise ships (and our navy), as you point out, operate under different rules due to the sheer numbers of people on board. They are often caught breaking even these less stringent regulations. Flag of convenience vessels are also regularly caught discharging untreated oily waste. Add the huge amounts of fuel burned by shipping worldwide and it’s one of the biggest greenhouse gas/pollution sources we have.
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@Passion for Peaches As a member of the science party on this project I can answer a couple of your questions with respect to the waste streams. The Polarstern does indeed have a wastewater treatment system (as required on most all ships in the Arctic these days) which produces an effluent stream largely free of organic waste. This effluent could impact the local environment, however, so the ship uses a long hose to pump the treated effluent more than 100m below the ship, below the ocean surface mixed layer. Because the effluent is fresh water (low density) and would therefore tend to float up to the surface, excess brine from the ship's freshwater production system is added to the effluent, bringing it back to a density that should stay at depth and slowly drift away from our location with the prevailing current.
Exhaust from the ship's generators is also an unavoidable fact of life, but the emissions are not as bad as when the ship is underway, breaking ice. Our group does atmospheric sampling, and thus far the ship emissions have not presented significant problems, although we make it a strict rule to sample only upwind of all potential sources of human contamination.
Solid wastes are all compacted and stored for transit back to land on the resupply ships.
None of these solutions are perfect, but all reasonable mitigation steps were considered in designing the project.
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@Byron Blomquist, thank you for your detailed reply. I’m glad to know that the waste issue has been so thoroughly considered.
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1) Great article, great pictures.
2) I didn't even know Germany had an icebreaker. Thanks.
3) Captain Schwarze looks the part.
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Wow !
17
Outstanding article...wish there were more like this.
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Exciting exploration at the extremes of weather, temperatures and light. But, in the Polarstern's dining room, is the picture that of a wooden ship 'beset' in ice? That is wicked humor!
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Esther, you are in for a big surprise when you go back in summer - 24 hours of sunlight, breaking up of ice floe, narwhals and an occasional polar bear.
11
I've been not-so-secretly building a resume to winter-over in Antarctica for years. Not surprisingly, the job options are considerably diverse. Last flight leaves at the end of February. You're not going anywhere for awhile.
In essence, the station operates the same way a ship would. A small number of people accomplishing a large number of tasks in absolute isolation. A tooth ache could become a life threatening ailment.
Sign me up.
Months of darkness and isolation sound cathartic. As if troubling shooting networks in a data center in nowhere suburbia was any safer than spending a winter in Antarctica. From what I hear, McMurdo throws better parties anyway.
12
Amazing photos and super interesting read.
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Sure,this behemoth is spewing diesel exhaust 24/7 year around ,enough to turn the surroundings black.How much waste ,of all kinds are generated and accumulated by this gigantic cruise liner prowling the arctic ice flow. So far we've got ice thickness and that of snow ,maybe micro plastic none of which is going to surprise anybody. Next ,would Greta approve ,jury's out for now,but what worries everyone is just this exploration and drilling and it's doubtful they will stop that,they may be part of the problem.
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@Alan Einstoss There's been a change in marine diesel fuel over the last few years to a low-sulfur mix. Cuts down on black carbon emissions significantly.
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@Alan Einstoss I think you might have not considered the differences of scale.
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Epic Adventure! Thank you for re-instilling the thrill of challenge and adventure! But, I must ask, is the picture shown in the Polarstern's dining room of a wooden ship beset by ice? Truly wicked humor if so, for few beset survived the endeavor. Ignore the distainers! Continue the quest for knowledge. Forever in your debt, Adventurers!
5
I lived for a few years in Northern Alaska in my youth.
The way I explain the feeling of living through an Arctic winter: it is like time has stopped.
It was an extraordinary experience. The Arctic is one of the most amazing landscapes in the world. It is fragile. We all depend upon its health. We need to do everything in our power to see that it continues as it has, so we continue. That's why I'm only voting for officials who support a Green New Deal.
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@Innisfree, I recommend Barry Lopez’s “Arctic Dreams” to anyone looking for some excellent descriptive writing about the Arctic. It’s from the 1980s, so I think it would be interesting even to re-read it, from today’s perspective.
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@Innisfree . . .I understand the crisis of climate and it's importance to the entire survival of planet Earth, our home. And I do hope, that if necessary, you will be patient and vote for anyone at all who opposes the current attack on the planet in our country. A vote against 45 will always be a vote for climate health.
A Green New Deal can be brought about, but first we have to get a sane, morally responsible president and a different Senate to even get started. First things first. I plead with you not to waste your precious vote this time around.
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@Passion for Peaches
"Arctic Dreams" is one of the best books I've read about any topic. A masterpiece of nonfiction writing.
6
These scientists/explorers embody the most noble aspect of humanity. Kudos to all involved with this important project.
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Wonderful, simply wonderful. Bravo to the organizers, funders, crew, scientists, and technicians. I don't doubt that the results of the investigation being conducted will be invaluable for understanding climate change, and thus the greatest challenge that humanity has ever faced--not to mention all the poor creatures that we're dragging with us towards what was at one time, not long ago, an entirely avoidable environmental disaster.
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It would be nice to know what they hope to discover beyond the obvious melting. I know those results are coming but at this point all we know is that there are more cracks in the ice.
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@Tom J There is much more information on Mosaic's website (https://mosaic-expedition.org/science/mission/) but in essence, climate models have a lot of uncertainty in the Arctic because it is so hard to get observations there, especially over the winter. The systems that we use to observe the rest of the world's oceans face severe challenges in the Arctic due to sea ice, extreme cold, and cloud cover. The data collected during the Mosaic expedition will be used to reduce model uncertainty.
One of the big goals of Mosaic is to study interactions between the Arctic atmosphere, ice, and ocean. There may be positive feedbacks in these interactions that aren't currently represented in models. Identifying these feedback loops can vastly improve model accuracy. Currently climate models underestimate the observed rate of Arctic sea ice loss, so there are probably physical processes that we are missing in them.
15
The ship is (among other things) there to study the environment. I wonder to what extent the presence of the ship itself (exhaust, etc.) effects that environment.
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@Peter Fairbank
yes, turn off the boat, give them some tents, a few dogs, some salmon biscuits, and a notepad. good enough, I think.
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@Peter Fairbank my two cents; as a point of reference this ship's exhaust puts out nowhere near the volumes of fume that single passenger vehicles do idling in parking lots while people eat Big Macs or waiting at stop lights, everywhere else on this planet. For the sake of research and knowledge about the damage we continue to do to the Earth, it's more than worth it.
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@Chris it's not worth it, actually. In my town when they park the dredge in the river and go to work, it fills the entire landscape with diesel. We all asphixiate. Its hapoening in the arctic, but you cant see it. Btw, january was 10 degrees hotter than normal in NJ. How about your state?
1