CU Boulder researchers, >500 international colleagues launch yearlong journey to study Arctic climate.
The German icebreaker Polarstern sails north from Tromsø, Norway, Friday evening with dozens of scientists from around the world, all determined to better understand how the Arctic climate system is changing, and what it means for all of us.
“Arctic sea ice is melting,” said CIRES researcher Matthew Shupe, who began planning the mission more than a decade ago. “It’s one of the fastest changing environments on the planet, and we need to understand that. We need to understand energy budgets in the region, the clouds, the ocean…how the entire system is changing as our earth system is changing.”
Led by the German Alfred Wegener Institute, the Multidisciplinary Drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) involves hundreds of researchers from 19 countries. There are oceanographers and ecologists, physicists, meteorologists, atmospheric scientists, and other experts who study the invisible flows of energy and gases between ocean and sea ice, sea ice and atmosphere.
The National Science Foundation, through its Office of Polar Programs (OPP), is the largest funder of the U.S. scientific effort, and the Department of Energy, through its Atmospheric Radiation Measurement program, was the first agency, internationally, to commit to supporting any MOSAiC project.
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