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.
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.
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.
The melting of the sea ice in the Arctic and the faster melting of Greenland’s ice cover are two prominent environmental changes that could accelerate sea level rise in the future. Researchers are therefore working on a broad front to better understand the mechanisms behind the melting ice and what consequences it will have.
Fredrik Dalerum, Docent in Ecology at the Department of Zoology, Stockholm University, leads a research group that participated in this summer’s expedition with the icebreaker Oden to the Ryder Glacier in northwestern Greenland. In addition to Fredrik, the group also consists of Karin Norén, Associate professor, and Johannes Måsviken, PhD student, all at the same department. In this research project, they study how Arctic species and ecosystems are affected by climate change.
Glaciers that terminate where there is water, such as fjords or open coastal waters, lose mass through so-called frontal ablation, which is the common name for the processes of iceberg calving and melt below the water surface. During the recent expedition with the icebreaker Oden to the Ryder Glacier in northern Greenland, researchers investigated frontal ablation with the help of time-lapse photography and LoTUS buoys.
