Excerpts from:
The Largest Arctic Science Expedition in History Finds Itself on Increasingly Thin Ice. By Michael Kodas. May 17, 2020 in
Inside Climate News.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16052020/arctic-coronavirus-climate-science-mosaic-research The statements below from a great article about the MOSAiC expedition give insight to the current state of the ASI and the 2020 melt season to date. The article appears to have been written when the May 11-15 weather was in the forecast, but had not happened yet, so the effects of that weather were not known. The May 11-15 "clear-sky / warm-up / Fram-flush" almost certainly exacerbated the conditions described in the article.
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" Even before the expedition had finished setting up its camps and instruments in November, the ice started cracking. Then, a storm sent huge rifts through the floe and knocked out the power system for several days. Cracks revealing open water repeatedly isolated Met City, sometimes forcing researchers to walk for more than an hour around the fissure to reach the site, a few hundred yards from the ship.
"We just didn't know that we were going to face this much cracking," Shupe told me. "It really did take us by surprise, even though we knew the ice was thin, we knew the Arctic was different, it still snuck out ahead of us somehow." "
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" An unusual weather pattern, which included the opening this spring of the largest ozone hole ever measured above the Arctic, produced winds that pushed MOSAiC's ice floe across the pole much faster than the expedition's organizers expected.
"We have this kind of flow regime in the Arctic right now that's been really static," Shupe said. "It's stuck where it is and it's blowing us across the Arctic faster than anticipated, faster than any of the past 12 years that we used in our analysis to figure out where we would go." "
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"Maybe the ice would slow down or even reverse direction, as it had early in the expedition, he thought. Colder weather might freeze some of the leads of open water that had fractured MOSAiC's floe. Maybe the ice would stabilize. But, increasingly, Shupe was having to come to terms with the fact that the ice floe he had hoped would be the expedition's home for a full year was unlikely to survive the summer.
"I went into it ready to be surprised, and it still got out ahead of me," he told me. "How fragile the ice has been. I knew it was gonna be thin, but it's still thinner and more fragile than I thought it would be." "