HARSH TERRAIN, COLD TRUTHS

A science expedition finds significant changes in the Arctic landscape

- POOJA BIRAIA JAISWAL

Marine biologist Antje Boetius was a PhD student when she first sailed to the Arctic thirty years ago. The Arctic Ocean's icy, white expanse had left her amazed.

Boetius is now director of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany's biggest polar research institute. On August 3 this year, she returned to the Arctic aboard the same ship of her first journey-the 42-year-old German icebreaker Polarstern.

It was Polarstern's seventh journey to the North Pole. Aboard the vessel with Boetius this time was a team of 53 scientists, largely PhD students from across the world, and a crew of 44. Boetius was the team's leader and chief scientist.

The team began its two-month journey from Tromso, Norway. Their mission: to study the effects of climate change in the Arctic in September, when the extent of sea ice touches the annual low.

The scientists say there has been a huge change in the polar landscape in the past three decades. Earlier, it was "extremely difficult and challenging" for the Polarstern to break ice and navigate the sea, but this time it was "shockingly very easy". The ice was no longer three to four metres thick; it had thinned out to just one metre. Polarstern could just glide past it.

"It doesn't even break the ice. It just moves through the ice as if it were butter," says Boetius, who returned with her team to Polarstern's home port of Bremerhaven in early October.

The expedition is scientifically significant because the summer of 2023 was the hottest on record since 1880, according to scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York. For Boetius and fellow scientists, the loss of sea ice in the Arctic was expected, but the change in landscape nevertheless came as a shock. "Normally you find thriving topical sea algae, but it was all just wide and empty this time. We were shocked because the area we saw was so huge," says Boetius.