Real time reports on the state of the Arctic ice pack as it melts through the summer
The North Pole!
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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.
After visiting the Geographic North Pole itself very early on 24 July 2019 we sailed south in search of a good floe to make a landing on. We stopped at 89 10.8N, 49 37.3E and made a landing within the large massif of old and sediment-filled ice that we passed through the previous day and which we saw at the North Pole on the previous cruise. The thickness of ice at the landing site was seen to be 200-300cm (see image)
We took the opportunity to take a closer look at the ice, measuring depth profiles across three ponds (image attached). Within an area of thicker ice in a discrete turquoise pond we had depths of up to 50cm and a freeboard of 36cm. Darker ponds that were a part of a linked system of flatter ice had freeboards of 6-10cm and depth of up to 20cm.
This dirty ice is notable for having a greater coverage of melt ponds (up to 4/10, vs 1-3/10 seen elsewhere) than other ice seen at the same latitudes. We believe this may be due to albedo effect of the dirt -- in a few ponds ...
Travelling south through the pack we made excellent time, staying on our own lead from the way north almost the entire way. The most interesting observation today was the state of melt at 82N as we approached the pack edge north of Franz Josef Land. In addition to frozen ponds we encountered nilas ice which constituted as much as 1/10 out of 8-9/10 total coverage. Otherwise the pack this close to the edge was very heavily melted, with up to 4/10 melt on some floes, and rotten ice just 60-70cm thick. Is this the start of a period of freezing, or does this nils simply represent a significant layer of meltwater floating at the ocean's surface?
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 ...
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