A year's journey in Arctic waters -MOSAiC Expedition

Do you ever think about the arctic circle and think why the antarctic permanently frozen and the arctic is not?

Well, I do too! But that's not what we are going to talk about in this post. We all know the ice sheets and glaciers of the north pole is melting rapidly, rising the sea levels due to global warming. Sea level rise is not something good for may countries especially island nations like the Maldives. So with the dire need to prevent the adverse effects, a scientific journey had begun. It is the MOSAiC Expedition.

The MOSAiC stands for Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate. The prime objective of this MOSAiC mission is to study the impact of climate change on the Arctic region and its impact on the rest of the world. The German research icebreaker RV Polarstern has departed for this mission from Tromsø, Norway in September 2019.

The icebreaker and its scientists have a mission to spend a year drifting through the Arctic Ocean. A total of 600 people from 17 countries, who have also send their aircraft and icebreakers for this expedition mission are participating in the arctic mission. The researcher will subsequently analyze the gathered data to study the impacts of climate change in the region and these data will also be used to know the climate change pattern of the rest of the world. The sea-level rise, greenhouse gas emission, and global warming all impact the climate change that is witnessed across the world. There have been occurrences of flash floods followed by drought, forest fires in Australia, and the Amazon.

MOSAiC will be the first year-round expedition mission into the central Arctic to study the Arctic climate system and its impact on the rest of the world. there are many institutes involved in the MOSAiC Mission.

This expedition mission has been designed by an international consortium of leading polar research institutions under the umbrella of the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC). The other institutes involved in this mission are Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), Germany, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Germany, Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI), Russia,  University of Colorado, USA, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), USA

The projected cost of the mission is around € 120 Million.

MOSAiC will help us understand the reasons for climate change in the polar region due to global warming. We can better understand the regional and global consequences of Arctic climate change after the expedition.  Its expeditions will support safer maritime and offshore operations, increase coastal-community resilience, contribute to an improved scientific basis for future traffic along northern sea routes.

This beneficial science mission will be successful over this year. As much as we hate quarantine imagine being locked up in an icebreaker (An icebreaker is a special-purpose ship or boat designed to move and navigate through ice-covered waters) for a year and wandering through ice wasteland. Don't forget the part when there is no sunlight or minimal sunlight for six months (arctic winter).

Suddenly quarantine doesn't sound so bad, does it?