Arctic expedition on board Swedish icebreaker ship Oden

Helen has joined a joint Swedish and American research expedition to the “High Arctic”, up near the north pole.  She will spend eight weeks on board the Swedish icebreaker Oden, and the majority of that time will be spent drifting with the sea ice in a region of about 95% ice cover.  The overall project is to park the ship deep in the summer sea ice, in order to study clouds and how the ocean and ice affect them.  There are around 40 scientists on board, as well as the Oden’s crew members.  You can read the summary Helen wrote for the expedition blog here.

There is an expedition website, and Stockholm University has a live ship tracker here.  There will also be blogs there from lots of the people on board as they go along, and they’ll also probably have more pictures than anyone else.  Helen will post updates here, in the “At Sea” section.

The Cosmic Shambles network has launched a blog section here, and Helen will be one of their contributors while she’s on Oden.  The aim of her blog there will be to have a look behind the scenes at how a human (or 60 of them, in this case) deals with being parked up at the top of the world for eight weeks.  Helen wrote “Last time around, even my Mum thought I’d gone mad when the biggest storm hit.  I’m pretty sure we’ll all go just as potty this time, even though we’re certainly not expecting any stormy seas”.

Tweeting is a bit tricky when you don’t have internet, but there may still be some tweets from @helenczerski.  Some of her colleagues on the expedition are also on twitter – keep an eye on @IanMBrooks, @MattESalter, @Arctic_Andy, @DrPrytherch, @CKatlein @gshowalt, @AmandaGrannas and @ArcticKerri. 

The Swedish Polar Research Secretariat will be tweeting here: @SvenskPolarforskning (sometimes in Swedish, sometimes English), using the hashtag  #ArcticOcean2018.  They also have a facebook page.

There will also hopefully be some audio updates on Inside Science.