In March 2019, at a crowded happy hour in Boulder, Colorado, I sat listening to Matt Shupe, an atmospheric scientist, describing his decades-long dream that was about to come true.
He was sprinting to finish the years of planning and preparations required to freeze an icebreaker into the Arctic Ocean ice as close to the North Pole as it could get. The vessel would drift with the ice for a year as a rotating cast of nearly 600 experts from 20 nations representing dozens of scientific disciplines spread out in research camps around the ship.
“It’s kind of like a work of art—a manifestation of something that was an idea at some point, and now it’s actually real,” Shupe told me of his Arctic daydream that had turned into a full-time obsession. “It was my life story for the last 10 or more years.”
Even the name suggested an artwork. MOSAiC—the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate—would be the largest Arctic research expedition in history, a $155 million mission to observe how the rapidly warming Arctic and its fast diminishing sea ice are affecting the atmosphere high above the expedition, the water below it and the weather throughout the Northern Hemisphere.
The warming of the Arctic was driving some of the most profound changes to the world’s climate. But the region’s inaccessibility made it less understood by science than just about anywhere else on the planet.
MOSAiC, which launched last September, hopes to fill that gap with the most detailed study ever of the polar sea, its atmosphere and the pack ice that functions something like a giant eggshell over the top of the Earth to modulate interactions between them. And all of this would take place over an uninterrupted year and document every aspect of a single, sprawling raft of that ice.
“Capturing a full year is one of the essential aspects of the expedition,” Shupe said. “We really need to capture that full cycle of the life of the ice.”
Then, in March—six months into the expedition—the coronavirus triggered calamity. Shupe, who had returned from MOSAiC last winter and wasn’t due to return to the ship until the summer, was desperately trying to get back, hoping to keep the coronavirus and the rapidly melting Arctic from turning his dream expedition into a frozen nightmare.
But the virus had sequestered both of us in our homes, a few miles away from one another in Colorado. MOSAiC seemed as distant as a moonshot as it struggled with both the blessing and the curse of its isolation in the ice.
Stranded on the Polarstern icebreaker, more than a hundred people worried about family members back home threatened by the pandemic while themselves facing the possibility of being marooned until June.
“There are some people that are having a hard time and they definitely want to come home,” Shupe told me over Skype. “Some people say, ‘Let’s take the ship home right now…Let’s just be done with this.'”
But Shupe and his colleagues in Germany spearheading the expedition had far too much invested in MOSAiC’s multi-disciplinary team and year-long mission to pull the plug. “I do not want to bring this to an end,” he said.
Source: Insideclimate News