The North Pole!

At approximately 0030 UTC on July 24th we reached the North Pole. The ice here was shattered into Cake and Small pieces, occasionally Medium, with a very roughly 50/50 mixture of old and first year ice. Image below.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

4 August At the Pole

Image
We spent a full day on 4 August at an ice station approximately 3 NM from the pole. We parked just three cables away but drifted south during the night. We had the same mix of old and first year reported for the day before, but one very notable feature was a soft and creamy white substance that we were unable to identify scattered across the ice (pictured). Found both in ponds and on the ice surface, it occurred in clusters and had melted itself 10+cm downwards into the ice. It appeared biological in origin and had the texture of a cosmetic cream. It could sometimes contain small areas that were yellow/brown in colour. We had a small team of citizen scientists active on the ice (pictured), collecting melt pond depth profiles for two different ice types -- the measurements will be published here in a few days. After leaving the ice station we returned to the pole in order to circle it at a distance of 0.7NM, making a world circumnavigation in around 30-45 minutes. In this time
Read more

Re: New Ice Forming in Svalbard

Hi Alex, Thanks for the update! Really useful for us and our analysts to get in-situ observations like this - the conditions around Svalbard have certainly been unusual this year, it will be very interesting to see how this progresses over the next few weeks/months. Best of luck with your activities in the remaining part of the season! Kind regards, Alistair On Mon, 26 Aug 2019 at 12:51, Penelope Mae Wagner < penelopew@met.no > wrote: ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Alex Cowan < alex.cowan@cantab.net > Date: Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 12:32 PM Subject: New Ice Forming in Svalbard To: alex.polarcollective.northpole < alex.polarcollective.northpole@blogger.com >, Donald K. Perovich < donald.k.perovich@dartmouth.edu >, Jennifer Hutchings < jhutchin@coas.oregonstate.edu >, Penelope Mae Wagner < penelopew@met.no >, Nick Hughes < nick.hughes@met.no >, istjenesten < istjenesten@met.no > Although the Polar Collective team has completed it
Read more

RE: Traversing the High 80s Pt2

This is a great example of the widespread ponding (flooding) you often get on undeformed first year ice. I really look forward to these messages, they are very interesting. Don -----Original Message----- From: victory@marsatmail.com < victory@marsatmail.com > Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2019 4:31 PM To: alex.polarcollective.northpole@blogger.com Cc: Donald K. Perovich < Donald.K.Perovich@dartmouth.edu >; penelopew@met.no ; jhutchin@coas.oregonstate.edu ; nick.hughes@met.no ; istjenesten@met.no Subject: Traversing the High 80s Pt2 As we continued north during 23 July we saw increasing amounts of old ice, requiring us to back-and-ram several times. Between 88N and 88.6N (along an approximate meridian of 60E) we saw partial concentrations of old ice varying from 3/10 to 5/10, with a thickness of 200-300cm. Floes were usually Small, occasionally Medium, and as usual embedded in the larger First Year floes. Melt is 2-3/10; discrete ponds with open tops and solid bo
Read more