The predicted drift track of Polarstern during MOSAiC, taken from the MOSAiC website.
This has been a (rare) good week for funding decisions. A loooooong time ago when I was a third year PhD student I wrote a blog post that mentioned the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) initiative. The Arctic has changed a lot over the last couple of decades, as evidenced by the shift from perennial (year long) to seasonal sea ice cover. This is a problem for climate modelers whose parameterizations and assumptions are based on observational records largely developed in the “old” Arctic. MOSAiC was conceived as a coupled ocean-ice-atmosphere study to understand key climatic and ecological processes as they function in the “new” Arctic. The basic idea is to drive the German icebreaker Polarstern into the Laptev Sea in the Fall of 2019, tether it to an ice flow, and allow it to follow the circumpolar drift (Fram style) for a complete year. This will provide for continuous time-series observations across the complete seasonal cycle, and an opportunity to carry out a number of key experiments.
I first attended a MOSAiC workshop in 2012 (when I wrote that first blog post). It only took six years and two tries, but we’ve officially received NSF support to join the MOSAiC expedition. Co-PI Brice Loose at URI and I will be carrying out a series of experiments to better understand how microbial community structure and ecophysiology control fluxes of O2 (as a proxy for carbon) and methane in the central Arctic Ocean. The central Arctic Ocean is a weird place and we know very little about how these processes play out there. Like the subtropical gyres it’s extremely low in nutrients, but the low temperatures, extreme seasonality, (seasonal) sea ice cover, and continental shelf influences make it very different from the lower-latitude oceans.
The German icebreaker Polarstern, which will host the MOSAiC field effort.
Congratulations!