Well, all week I’ve been in the Arctic sea ice. Everywhere out here is interesting, but there is one place in particular that I find most interesting and that is the middle of our ice floe. Out there is very thick ice and it is dirty with rocks and sand. The sun has been melting the ice a lot lately, so there are little “melt ponds” everywhere on top of the ice. These are little channels, like rivers, that connect the ponds together and connect all the way to the edge of the ice floe. Out there in the middle of our floe it seems like the desert, with rivers carving away fascinating features in the surface.
The big news for us now is that we are moving very quickly towards the edge of the sea ice. We drift to the south and the melting ice edge moves to the north. Eventually we will meet, and that means the ice we are working on will melt away and become ocean again. This makes it hard for us to do our work! So sometime in the coming days we will have to pack up our equipment from the ice and bring it back onboard Polarstern, then take Polarstern on an adventure further back into the ice.
