Nice spotting, Jim. Now if we only had a list of all urls from the people on board tweeting or posting to home institution blogs, we could keep up a lot better.
https://www.bnl.gov/mosaic/ collects posts from Brookhaven NL and posts some very nice photos. They are going to have a huge problem initially with polar bears because those are highly concentrated near the Laptev sea ice edge where the food is, rather than swimming around in 1000 km patch of open ocean.
Hopefully they can scare the bears off and not shoot them the way drilling projects on Greenland have done. Walrus have been in the news lately too, sinking a Russian zodiac near FJL. The Oden photographed a walrus messing with scientific gear last summer at the North Pole. A walrus thrashed Nansen's kayaks on the return trip. I don't anticipate any problems with penguins.
I have belatedly realized that a changing hourly PS position report from sailwx doesn't mean the ship is underway because sea ice drift is of comparable magnitude to them poking about looking for the perfect floe.
They have fixed the daily ice obliteration on the Sentinel radar; the heavy triangle is gone and replaced by a too-small circle. It's still opaque though. The problem is working with one layer; the red route should be done in a second layer with a transparency slider (a capability offered already in Feb 1990 by Photoshop 1.0).
The reason I bring this up is we need a very clear radar image of the floe in order to match it with Sept 21-24 visible Worldview (the last clear sunlit days) to allow traceback of its origin to early June when Ascat can pick up its motion back to formation in the fall of 2018.
As Uniq noted earlier, this is best done using the unadorned jp2 file served by polarview.aq/arctic. It sounds though that the floe can still be photographed from above in the visible even though WV's growing pole hole blacked out this latitude and north about ten days ago.
That is, the PS will determine all its current and future properties such as healed leads, pressure ridges, underwater keels, brine pockets, bottom algae, sunlight transparency, snow layers, fire soot etc etc.
My expectation is this floe formed as FYI on the periphery of the ice pack maybe two hundred km north and a bit east of Kotelny Island (NSI). It is not a piece of MYI from the Beaufort arm, nor related to thick ice between the Pole and CAA, nor broken-off landfast Siberian ice. It then drifted over the last 11 months, initially along its parallel (ie zonally) but with an admixture of south meridional this spring, to its current position, graduating to SYI on Sept 15.
Note the primary floe at 3 km diameter is far short of the 30-40 radius necessary for the secondary deployments. The adjacent floes, whose leads are now freezing up, will have a similar provenance. These will thicken but never attain the structural strength of the main floe. Thus the Polarstern is thus moored on a future shear line.
I've attached a bit of Norwegian maritime humor because the main Mosaic planning document shows the PS moored starboard. It is customary for the captain to be given a green and red sock as mnemonic to avoid collisions with other transiting vessels.
Following up on earlier observations of FishooW and Zlabe on the unusually persistent negativity of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) this summer, I graphed the last 12 months of daily readings. The onset in late May coincided very closely with the cessation of Fram/Nares export and TransPolar Drift, per Ascat and OsiSaf. No return to positive winter values is foreseen this month.
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/pna/nao.shtmlTPD drift would be nice but most research programs on the Polarstern don't require it. A lot of this is Nansen nostalgia (or should I say Sverdrup nostalgia as he captained the Fram after Nansen abandoned ship).
The Akademik Fedorov is named after a distinguished early participant Yevgeny Fyodorov (Фёдоров) in the first of many Russian sea ice drift experiments. (These 'don't count' as not conducted by westerners, any more than Alfred Wegener, not an American, counts as the 1912 discoverer of plate tectonics despite a whole book on continental drift.)
Russian scientists landed a plane (no runway) at 89°25′N 78°40′W in May 1937 and drifted 2,850 km over nine months to mid-Greenland where they were miraculously picked off by icebreakers before the floe melted out. (They carried a hand-cranked radio so did not depend on a battery charge lasting.) The PS carries two Piston Bullies to plow airport-smooth runways, along with innumerable creature comforts, yet millennials on board
complain every day about perceived hardships.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Konstantinovich_Fyodorovhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drifting_ice_stationSome of the AWI documents conflate ice drift on the ocean (entirely wind-driven) with ice floating down a river (eg annual breakup of MacKenzie).
Surface currents in the central Arctic Ocean are
entirely negligible (discounting keel-induced local advection). AO tides and tidal currents are very minor and also irrelevant.
Think of a dry leaf skittering along the sidewalk. It's the wind that carries the leaf along. The sidewalk itself is not moving. For the Arctic Circumpolar Boundary Current see:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2010JC006637