Happy New Year 2024 (and sorry for the forum being offline some hours) /DM
... It is planned that she will be replaced by Polarstern II around the year 2017, after it was decided that the European Research Icebreaker Aurora Borealis will not be built in her original form.
HistoryOn 7 September 1991, Polarstern, assisted by the Swedish arctic icebreaker Oden reached the North Pole as the first conventional powered vessels.[3] Both scientific parties and crew took oceanographic and geological samples and had a common tug of war and a football game on an ice floe. Polarstern again reached the pole exactly 10 years later[4] together with the USCGC Healy. She returned for a third time on 22 August 22 2011 at exactly 9.42 a.m. This time she reported the most frequently recurring ice thickness at 0.9 m compared with 2 m in 2001, which corresponds to the long-term average.[5]On March 2, 2008, one of the vessel's helicopters crashed on a routine flight to the Antarctic Neumayer II base. The German pilot and a Dutch researcher were killed, three other passengers were injured.[6][7]On October 17, 2008, Polarstern was the first research ship to ever travel through both the Northeast Passage and the Northwest Passage in one cruise, thus circumnavigating the North Pole.[8]
have a look where Polarstern is now, I wish we could get more information from there. A webcam like the one on the Healy would be great but maybe they want to use their data transmission bandwidth for other stuff. I have no clue about this I have to admit.
Despite the pessimistic predictions of certain “skeptics” in the Twittosphere the good ship Polarstern has somehow managed to escape the vice like grip of all that thick, old sea ice north of Greenland:
By the look of that route there was no ice?
Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) will begin on Sept. 20 - when the icebreaker RV Polarstern sets out in search of an ice floe to which it can pin its fate.The ship will spend the next 12 months following that single floe through the central Arctic and across the North Pole - a 387-foot drifting research station inhabited by a rotating cast of some 300 meteorologists, biologists, oceanographers and ice experts.…About 60 people will be living and working on the Polarstern at any given moment; most have signed up for two-month stints, though a few may be onboard for half the year or more. Virtually their only link to the rest of the world will be the ships and aircraft scheduled to arrive every 60 days - winter blizzards and stormy seas permitting - to switch out passengers and restock food and fuel.Simply getting to the Polarstern can take as long as a month; participants joke that it's easier to reach the International Space Station, 250 miles above the surface of the Earth.…But the drift strategy has perils. Choose the wrong ice floe, and the scientists could end up in Russian waters, where outsiders can't collect data without special permits. Or the ice could carry them far to the west, beyond the reach of rescue missions should anything go awry.Analyses of ice paths from previous years suggest that the ideal floe lies about 335 miles east of the North Pole. By the end of a year, it should deliver the Polarstern to open water somewhere between Greenland and the Svalbard archipelago.A successful transpolar drift - one that didn’t kill nearly everyone onboard - has been achieved just twice before in history: first by the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, in 1893, and a decade ago by the small crew of a privately owned sailing ship called the Tara. The Polarstern will be the first modern research vessel to spend an entire year at the northernmost place on the planet.
For the biggest Arctic expedition ever, scientists will trap themselves in sea ice
For the biggest Arctic expedition ever, scientists will trap themselves in sea ice QuoteAnalyses of ice paths from previous years suggest that the ideal floe lies about 335 miles east of the North Pole.
Analyses of ice paths from previous years suggest that the ideal floe lies about 335 miles east of the North Pole.
My guess: "335 miles south of the pole along longitude 90˚E". We will probably find out in September.
For the biggest Arctic expedition ever, scientists will trap themselves in sea ice "Simply getting to the Polarstern can take as long as a month; participants joke that it's easier to reach the International Space Station, 250 miles above the surface of the Earth."Interesting stuffIndeed...more folks have been in space than have circumnavigated sailing single handed, a great many more...bligh…
