Greenland’s melting ice sheet has in recent years contributed with about 26 percent to the global sea-level rise according to published calculations, but how different glaciers are affected by climate change differs. Research from the Ryder Expedition with the icebreaker Oden in 2019, shows that a relatively shallow formation in the seabed in front of one of North Greenland’s largest glaciers, reduces the amount of warmer Atlantic waters that reach the glacier and melt it from below.
Pauline Snoeijs Leijonmalm, Professor of Marine Ecology at Stockholm University, participated in the first leg of five during the polar expedition MOSAiC. A strong memory is when the German research icebreaker RV Polarstern anchored to an ice floe to drift with the pack ice in the Arctic Ocean for a year.
In 2018, the research expedition Arctic Ocean was carried out with the icebreaker Oden. One of the goals of the research on board was to understand how clouds form in the Arctic. With the help of data collected during the expedition, researchers at Stockholm University and the Swiss EPFL, among others, have now published an article in Nature Communications.
Twelve researchers at Stockholm University and the University of Gothenburg will participate in an expedition to the East Siberian Arctic Shelf where they will study greenhouse gas emissions from thawing permafrost, which can accelerate global warming. The expedition is part of the International Siberian Shelf Study (ISSS), a Swedish-Russian collaboration that goes back fifteen years.
We welcome two new employees to the secretariat’s ship-based research support on the icebreaker Oden – a technician and an IT technician, Alex Lüdge and Anton Sandström. Both look forward to working with future research expeditions.
Charlotte Fredriksson works as a PhD student at the Department of Geological Sciences at Stockholm University. To prepare for field studies in Alaska, she went to the Abisko Scientific Research Station and attended a field course given by the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat.
The Swedish Polar Research Secretariat supports five research projects within the year-long Arctic Expedition MOSAiC, where a total of nine researchers from Swedish universities participate. Salar Karam, PhD student in Oceanography at the University of Gothenburg, is now preparing to participate in the final phase of the research expedition.
Patric Simões Pereira, Postdoctor at the University of Gothenburg, is now heading back from the international research expedition MOSAiC where he spent six months studying halogenated organic compounds.
For almost 19 weeks, research engineer Adela Dumitrascu participated in the world’s largest polar expedition MOSAiC in the Arctic Ocean. During the expedition, she took samples on snow, ice and water to understand the processes associated with the greenhouse gas halocarbon. Now she is back in Gothenburg to continue with the analysis of the data.
The MOSAiC expedition has faced logistical challenges due to the coronavirus but is soon ready to enter its next phase. John Paul Balmonte, researcher in water ecosystems at Uppsala University and Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, is currently in quarantine in Germany and soon ready to start his transit to the German research vessel Polarstern.
