Arctic Climate Impact Tour 2011

Nick Toberg and Till Wagner went to the North Greenland Sea in September 2011, to measure the properties and thickness of the sea ice aboard the Greenpeace ship ARCTIC SUNRISE - to document their work they started writing this blog.

As the ice was reaching a new record low (see the NSIDC sea ice extent graph) this year, we went back to carry on our work.

Last year, we were joined by SCANLAB, who performed 3d laser scans of the surface of the ice. They are on board again this year, but now we're getting the bottom as well: Hanumant Singh from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is joining with his team to get 3d profiles of the underside of the ice.

So now, for a historic first, we got the whole 3d picture of sea ice floes in the Arctic Ocean.

On board as well this year was the master of it all, our group leader Professor Peter Wadhams.

After the Arctic Climate Impact Tour, Peter and Till travelled to West Greenland and took part in expedition Operation Iceberg - a BBC funded science project that was subsequently featured in the 2 part BBC 2 documentary Operation Iceberg.

11/09/2011

More fog, bears and cracks - and now snow

quick update.
So we've been back in the ice for three days now, and the Arctic has not exactly been forthcoming. We've been fogged in almost constantly - and whenever the fog teases us by opening up a little bit it starts raining, and lately snowing quite heavily. Yesterday a big solitary bear circled the ship for a bit and then seemed to settle just at the edge of the fog line, as if to say, you might not always see me - but I'm here! 
Nick and I just gave an interview to the Greenpeace video man, in basically a blizzard - so I'm hopeful we'll look pretty hard.  The southafrican media team has been really unobtrusive and pleasant to work with. 
Apart from fog-inhibited aerial imagery we've been able to do some good work - Will's been busily scanning, yesterday I managed to collect over 1000 survey points, the result is pictured here. 

Nick extracted some impressive samples with the corer and the crew has continued drilling like pros. 
So, all is good here, tonight we'll be heading back to Longyearbyen to pick up Sun and Time Magazine representatives... should be an interesting next leg...

bye for now and somebody please send us up some sunshine - or at least a fairly powerful fog dispeller. 
oh, and there should be a fairly big piece in the independent on sea ice (maybe mentioning us) tomorrow
at 11:50

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