[music] Kurtz: You know, there’s this big
unknown. You’re headed out into this alien landscape that’s just
completely hostile to you and you know if you didn’t a nice ship
and extremely warm clothes, you probably wouldn’t be able to
survive. [music]
MOSAiC as a whole, it’s a yearlong
drifting expedition. So it involves people from twenty different
nations, about 600 scientists. It’s a huge,
massive effort meant to study the Arctic as a system.
Not just the ice, but things like the atmosphere, the ocean,
biogeochemistry. All kinds of things in a way that allows us to look at
what’s happening throughout the course of the year. [ship horn and orchestra music]
So we left Tromsø on September 20th, took
us ten days or so between leaving port,
sailing out, picking up some instrumentation and then starting to
sail into the ice pack and starting to search for the floe.
It was really difficult
to find the floe because we needed ice that thick enough
to support all our equipment, some of it’s very heavy, and to do this safely.
And actually one of the big surprises to me and a lot of people on
board was just how thin the ice was. You’d get out on the ice but it’s dangerous
It’s an alien landscape, it’s cold, there’s bears.
The polar bear situation was really
interesting and,
yeah, kind of terrifying. When we were out
on the ice and we were setting things up, taking measurements,
the bears did come back. Two times when I was there. And
there they came to our camp and they were doing things like messing with
the equipment and going through our site. So there it was different because
they’re more on the turf that we had set up. You know, this is our turf now and now
they’re coming in. I could see them in places that I had been.
[polar bears grunting, music]
So we were very isolated on the Polarstern
and we had very limited connectivity. We had a
email account we could send 50 kilobytes a message. It was
a big change for me and a lot of people. A lot of people said,
you know after a week or so I didn’t miss it anymore. And I was one of those people.
I really appreciated being a bit more isolated for a while
and experiencing life in a different way.
Doing field work like
this brought me right there to the ice. When I do my research
I use data like this from the data that’s taken
up close on the ice. Sometimes that’s the only way to get information on the ice. Things
like how dense is the ice, or how dense is the snow, you can’t do this remotely.
But we can use this to do calibration and validation
of ICESat-2 over the course of the year. So this is valuable for
improving the retrieval techniques we use for ICESat-2.
For me, to be on the ground and get that different look at the ice
on the surface, it just helps me as a scientist come up with new ideas
and to inspire me to use the data that I have,
and then think about this in a totally new way and a different way.
[music]