Scientists hope monitoring the ice through winter, as well as summer, will give insight into the effect of winds, clouds, snow and sun on melt rates

A research ship will spend an entire year adrift with the ice floes of the Arctic to better understand the disappearance of the polar ice cap.



Scientists meeting in Fairbanks for the Arctic Science Summit warned this week that the area covered by this winter’s Arctic sea ice could be the lowest ever recorded, after three months of extremely warm temperatures and above freezing days at the North Pole.



The international research cruise will set out for the Laptev sea off Siberia, aiming to monitor the sea ice across its entire life cycle – from the time new ice forms in autumn, through the utter darkness of winter, to the melting of ice in the early summer.



Most research voyages in the Arctic take place in the summer months, but this voyage will also operate during the dark winter months, when temperatures plunge to 40F or even 50F below.

“We are going to stick with that piece of ice and track it, as it grows and as it shrinks,” said Matthew Shupe, a researcher at the University of Colorado, who is leading the Mosaic voyage. “The goal is to integrate into the system and see what happens to the ice for an entire year.”



The Mosaic research project will look at the behaviour of the ice – from metre thick chunks of ice that have remained frozen for years to thin sheets that grow and melt within a single season – to try to understand how the winds, clouds, snow and sun are affecting the ice melt.

“The ice is so diverse. Some of it is thick and rough and dirty, and some of it is very thin,” Shupe said. “And then you have lots of melt ponds.”



The $60m (£41m) research project, involving 40 scientists from the US, Germany and Russia, is expected to launch in October 2019.

In a separate initiative, the World Climate Research Programme and the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, this week offered a 500,000 Swiss franc prize to the team of scientists building an autonomous underwater vehicle (UAV) capable of travelling for 2,000km under the surface of the Arctic or Antarctic sea ice.



The rapid melting of the polar ice caps has injected new urgency into scientists’ efforts to understand the climate systems operating in the Arctic. The bright white ice floating over the Arctic is an important driver of weather in the lower latitudes, according to scientists.

The loss of Arctic sea ice has already been linked by some scientists to disruptions in the jet stream, and the extreme cold blasts of the “polar vortex”.

Researchers now anticipate that the Arctic will be open water in the summer months by 2030 or 2040 – although it will continue to freeze over in the winter months.



“Sometime in the 2030s or 2040s time frame, at least for a few days you won’t have ice out there in the dead of summer,” said John Walsh, chief scientist of the International Arctic Research Centre.

