Two weeks after leaving northern Norway for the Central Arctic, and with the polar darkness settling in, an icebreaker carrying climate researchers settled next to an ice floe on Friday, putting itself at the mercy of the drifting ice for a planned yearlong expedition to better understand the changing Arctic climate.

Scientists on the 400-foot ship, Polarstern, and an accompanying Russian icebreaker selected the ice floe, which is roughly in the shape of an oval a mile and a half wide by a little more than two miles long, on Thursday.

“We’ve found our home for the months to come,” Markus Rex, an atmospheric physicist and the expedition’s leader, said in a statement issued by the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany.

Open water will rapidly freeze around the ship, locking it in place as it travels with a current called the transpolar drift. The floe’s location, in the northern Laptev Sea about 350 miles from the North Pole, gives the researchers what they say is their best chance of completing the expedition, by drifting past the pole and then south to the Fram Strait east of Greenland next fall.