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[music]
Kurtz: You know, there’s this big

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unknown. You’re headed out into this alien landscape that’s just

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completely hostile to you and you know if you didn’t a nice ship

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and extremely warm clothes, you probably wouldn’t be able to

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survive.
[music]

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MOSAiC as a whole, it’s a yearlong

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drifting expedition. So it involves people from twenty different

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nations, about 600 scientists. It’s a huge,

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massive effort meant to study the Arctic as a system.

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Not just the ice, but things like the atmosphere, the ocean,

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biogeochemistry. All kinds of things in a way that allows us to look at

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what’s happening throughout the course of the year.
[ship horn and orchestra music]

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So we left Tromsø on September 20th, took

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us ten days or so between leaving port,

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sailing out, picking up some instrumentation and then starting to

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sail into the ice pack and starting to search for the floe.

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It was really difficult

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to find the floe because we needed ice that thick enough

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to support all our equipment, some of it’s very heavy, and to do this safely.

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And actually one of the big surprises to me and a lot of people on

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board was just how thin the ice was. You’d get out on the ice but it’s dangerous

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It’s an alien landscape, it’s cold, there’s bears.

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The polar bear situation was really

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interesting and,

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yeah, kind of terrifying. When we were out

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on the ice and we were setting things up, taking measurements,

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the bears did come back. Two times when I was there. And

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there they came to our camp and they were doing things like messing with

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the equipment and going through our site. So there it was different because

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they’re more on the turf that we had set up. You know, this is our turf now and now

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they’re coming in. I could see them in places that I had been.

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[polar bears grunting, music]

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So we were very isolated on the Polarstern

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and we had very limited connectivity. We had a

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email account we could send 50 kilobytes a message. It was

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a big change for me and a lot of people. A lot of people said,

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you know after a week or so I didn’t miss it anymore. And I was one of those people.

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I really appreciated being a bit more isolated for a while

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and experiencing life in a different way.

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Doing field work like

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this brought me right there to the ice. When I do my research

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I use data like this from the data that’s taken

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up close on the ice. Sometimes that’s the only way to get information on the ice. Things

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like how dense is the ice, or how dense is the snow, you can’t do this remotely.

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But we can use this to do calibration and validation

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of ICESat-2 over the course of the year. So this is valuable for

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improving the retrieval techniques we use for ICESat-2.

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For me, to be on the ground and get that different look at the ice

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on the surface, it just helps me as a scientist come up with new ideas

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and to inspire me to use the data that I have,

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and then think about this in a totally new way and a different way.

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[music]