The Greatest Polar Expedition of All Time

The Arctic Mission to the Epicenter of Climate Change

Markus Rex, Sarah Pybus

• Publisher: Greystone Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9783791386706
• eBook ISBN: 9781771649490
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

??For readers of Madhouse at the End of the Earth, Endurance, and other seafaring adventure stories comes a thrilling account of a 21st-century Arctic mission. " A contemporary classic!"—Ken McGoogan, author of Fatal Passage "Show-stopping."­— Publisher's Weekly STARRED Review The Greatest Polar Expedition of All Time vividly describes one year aboard the Polarstern, a powerful ice-breaker ship that journeyed deep into the Arctic in 2019, carrying over 100 scientists and crew known as the MOSAiC Expedition. Hailing from across the world, they would become the largest expedition to ever survive a polar winter. Their purpose? To understand—and predict—the impacts of climate change on the Arctic.Written by the expedition's leader, the renowned atmospheric scientist Markus Rex, this page-turner reads like a captain's log of daily life aboard the Polarstern. Living in one of the most remote, dangerous, and electrifying places on earth, Rex describes incredible sights: polar bears playing with scientific equipment, Christmas parties in the bitter cold, frostbitten scientists, and hair-raising storms that threaten to break the Polarstern's cables and send it flying across the ice. He also reveals breathtaking science from deep inside the sea ice. Filled with sobering, heart-warming, and bone-chilling moments, The Greatest Polar Expedition of All Time is a testament to Rex's extraordinary drive to save a precious ecosystem. It's also an ode to a place that has beguiled sailors and explorers for centuries.

Part I Fall

The Polarstern heads into the ice.

1 It Begins

September 20, 2019: Day 1

THE POLARSTERN SITS at Tromsø pier, resplendent, her hull illuminated in the encroaching darkness. It’s time! I stand on board and look at the crowd celebrating on the shore. Our starboard decks—our landward side—are full of people. Our team of around one hundred scientists, technicians, and crew members is embarking on an adventure that will see us frozen into the ice for months on end, alone at the end of the world, on the biggest Arctic expedition of all time.

I look down. To commemorate our departure, artists have projected a light installation—a moving ice floe—onto the concrete of the pier; in the shipyard, the party tent glows in the dusk. Anja Karliczek (German minister of education and research), Otmar Wiestler (president of the Helmholtz Association), and Antje Boetius (director of the Alfred Wegener Institute, or AWI) have given speeches to send us on our way. This is an honor for us and our project—and a sign of just how important the Arctic and global warming are now considered by politicians and society. The press has turned out in force. Before boarding, we drank a toast and said a special goodbye to Antje, who has advocated for our expedition so fiercely for so many years, helped with the planning, and made so many things happen; we know she would love to be traveling with us.

Is that a teardrop I can see? It must be the brisk Tromsø wind! Uwe Nixdorf, head of our logistics department, is there along with Klaus Dethloff, who birthed the idea for MOSAiC years ago. They watch with pride as our plans become reality. An expedition like ours cannot be achieved by one country or one institution alone; many people have been working and fighting for this for a long time—including Matthew Shupe, standing next to me on board. We are all thrilled to see our efforts pay off. The guests raise their glasses; the Polarstern’s hull puts several arm lengths between us. Friends and family wave from below, my wife and two sons among them. We wave back. Many pairs of eyes seek out their loved ones for one last glance. But the atmosphere is too exuberant for tears; this is no place for melancholy thoughts.

And now it’s time to go! The band plays, the gangway lifts, we cast off, and with a long toot of her horn, the Polarstern gently starts to move. Soon we can no longer make out the people in the harbor. Our friends disappear into the darkness and the music is swallowed by the wind.

I stay on deck for quite a while, looking out over the fjord. The lights on the coast, and later the Norwegian islands, pass by in the darkness. Cozy lights in snug Norwegian houses. Just like the little house I share with my family in Germany, in the heart of Potsdam-Babelsberg, a district not far from Berlin that feels almost like a village. It will be a long time before I see it again. While the people on the shore—and their families—are coming to the end of a normal day, our team will not have a normal day or see our families for quite some time. What will the coming months bring?

As I think back, the months leading up to the expedition seem almost surreal, a whirlwind of final preparations. My house looked like an expedition camp, mountains of things waiting to be packed. But more than anything, the time I had left with my family became more precious as each day passed. Slowly it sank in that in the coming year, we would spend nine whole months apart, including Christmas, New Year’s, and all our birthdays. Despite this, my two sons—aged nine and eleven—are thrilled by the expedition. They know all about it and share our excitement. This comforts me somewhat in the face of our long separation. My wife has never known me otherwise—I have always embarked on long expeditions—and is equally enthusiastic. At least we can send each other messages; previous generations of polar explorers couldn’t even do that.

During this time, I often think about Fridtjof Nansen and his team, who embarked on a very similar voyage 126 years ago and demonstrated that such an expedition was indeed possible—an enormous achievement given their ship, the Fram, was made of wood. They set off into the complete unknown, with no way to communicate with the outside world and no idea of whether they would ever come back alive. How did they feel in the final days before departure? What anxieties must have plagued those men (yes, back then they were all men; things are different now) and their families? And how much better do we have things today?

THE POLARSTERN

The Polarstern has been sailing to the most remote corners of the planet since 1982. She has many roles: she supplies the German research station in the Antarctic (Neumayer Station III on the Ekström Ice Shelf near Atka Bay) and is used almost constantly in the polar regions to research ice, the ocean and the life within it, biogeochemical processes, the atmosphere, and the climate. On average, the Polarstern spends 310 days of the year away from her home in Bremerhaven. She is also one of the world’s most capable research icebreakers; she has a strong double hull with a typically rounded shape that can easily break through ice five feet thick. Her 20,000 horsepower provides enough force to ram through even thicker ice. She is a floating research institute, housing nine laboratories with highly specialized instruments. New features added for MOSAiC include a scientific container deck in the bow.

Now we are actually on our way! The Polarstern creates foamy waves at first, then her wake grows smaller, merges with the ocean, and disappears entirely. It feels good to watch, a sign that we are detaching ourselves from all those years of planning and the final, stressful days in Tromsø harbor.

Now, the overwhelming pressures of the last few days ashore give way to the calm that always descends as a ship glides slowly and steadily through the ocean—particularly as the wake disappears into the dark nothingness of the nighttime sea.

Slowly, it dawns on me that we are on our way, that we have nobody to rely on but ourselves. For better or worse, we have only what we carry with us; this goes for our socks, headlamps, and woolly hats as well as our equipment and provisions. We can’t stop off to do some shopping. There won’t be any deliveries. We can’t expect any help from the outside world.

Paradoxically, this is reassuring. The world has suddenly become very small. We have few options or courses of action, but even that is strangely relaxing. There’s no point in frantically listing last-minute tasks or purchases. Before sailing, we began to think in ever-smaller units of time, ultimately in hours and minutes, but now we have all the time in the world. The expedition will last a year. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. And that is something to be approached with peace and serenity. I unpack a few of my many boxes, then go to bed. Within a minute I’m sleeping like a log. You can always rely on the Polarstern to rock you to sleep.

September 21, 2019: Day 2

OUR FIRST MORNING at sea. We can still see a few Norwegian islands on the horizon, gleaming through the overcast sky, but by midday they have disappeared completely. We also lose our cell signal. Civilization’s radio waves can’t reach us now. The Polarstern fearlessly pitches through the churning water. We round Scandinavia’s North Cape at around 11:00 AM and follow a northeast course, into the Barents Sea, which is open and ice-free in the late summer.

It’s good to feel the movement, the familiar rolling and pitching, as the Polarstern forges ahead. I’m drawn to the P-deck, the highest deck above the bridge, the brisk wind blowing around me, the pitching ship below, the unencumbered view all the way to the horizon. This is one of my favorite spots on the vessel.

September 22, 2019: Day 3

WE ARE MAKING excellent progress through the open water of the Northeast Passage, traveling at a good thirteen knots (15 mph) against the wind. The wind grows stronger as the day goes on, and the Polarstern continues blithely through waves that reach an average height of thirteen feet. Occasionally the water washes over our working deck, and some people start to feel seasick. But the mood on board remains excellent. After all those years of planning, we are enthusiastic and can’t wait to reach the ice.

We have made ourselves at home and stowed our luggage in our cabin lockers; along the corridors, each door has a row of bulky work boots and padded polar boots to be worn on the ice. There are two people per cabin, each of which features a bunk bed, a little seating area with a table, a small separate bathroom, and not much else. My single cabin consists of a bedroom and an office with a cozy seating area.

But we don’t spend much time in our cabins. We’re already working all day. The laboratories have to be set up, the boxes unpacked, and the instruments calibrated. Despite having a lot less space than on land, we rack up huge step counts between the decks, labs, and containers.

The Akademik Fedorov, our escort ship for the first leg of the journey, left Tromsø yesterday afternoon. She was supposed to cast off with us but had to wait for equipment that arrived at the harbor too late. Now the Fedorov, the flagship of the Russian polar research fleet, is following our route into the ice. She’s carrying additional equipment and people

WORKING DECK

The main point of access to the ice via a gangway. In a heated cabin, the “gangway watch” record who is on the ice and who has returned. The back of the deck has another heated cabin with a semicircular panoramic window, where the “stern watch” look out for polar bears and secure the area behind the ship that can’t be seen from the bridge.

HELIDECK

This is where the Polarstern’s two BK117 helicopters take off and land when running scientific missions or providing an overview of the ice conditions. This is also where we release research balloons into the stratosphere.

LABORATORY CONTAINER

The ship’s hold houses several laboratory containers, both here and at the bow. Some can be cooled to various low temperatures, while some provide specific light conditions for biological work. Other containers are filled with devices that take atmospheric measurements, drawing in air from outside the ship.

SLIDE BEAM

In the fourth and fifth expedition phases, this is used to lower the large, heavy ocean instruments deep into the water column through a hole in the ice. In the first and second phases, a new procedure is used involving the ship’s crane and a hole in the ice farther from the ship.

LARGE WET LAB

The largest workroom on the expedition. This is where the large remote sensing instruments are set up. It is also the home of the drones and the HELIPOD, a towed system for atmospheric measurements that is flown with a helicopter.

CROW’S NEST

This has a rotating infrared camera that keeps a constant 360-degree watch for polar bears—even in the total darkness of the polar night. However, it breaks during the first expedition phase, as does the identical replacement camera. We are then left with two reliable infrared cameras: one that can swivel and zoom, and one that continuously monitors the area behind the ship.

P-DECK/MONKEY DECK

This is the location of the satellite antennae for data transmission. Atmospheric scientists use the unobstructed view of the sky above and have installed (among other things) a large, swiveling cloud radar; this is so heavy that the P-deck had to be specially reinforced.

BRIDGE

The command center for all activities. Work in the ice camp is constantly monitored from the bridge. It is the central unit for radio communications with the teams on the ice and serves as a permanent lookout point for polar bears around the camp. During winter’s polar night, we use the infrared cameras (which are controlled from here) along with our three search-lights; in summer’s polar day, we use binoculars.

MEETING ROOM

The expedition team meets here at least once a day. Polar bear shifts are arranged for the following day and volunteers are often sought—and always quickly found—for a range of tasks in the research camp.

LAB ROOMS

Many of the water samples obtained from the depths of the ocean using the CTD rosette (page →)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Map: Arctic Pack Ice and the Route of the Polarstern
• Prologue
• Part I: Fall
• Part II: Winter
• Part III: On Land
• Part IV: Spring
• Part V: Summer
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Image Credits
• Copyright Page
• Index