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Heather Tabisola >> Good morning.

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All right, just as people are joining, clicking folks off here and there, so.

Happy Monday.

Another Monday Seminar, the last Monday seminar.

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So, again, good morning.

Welcome to our 2020 fall EcoFOCI seminar series.

I'm Heather Tabisola, one of the co-leads with Jens Nielsen and you will see him shortly.

This seminar is part of NOAA's EcoFOCI bi-annual seminar series, focused on the ecosystems of the North Pacific Ocean, Bering Sea, and US Arctic to improve understanding of ecosystem dynamics and applications of that understanding to the management of living marine resources.

Since October 21st, 1986, the seminar has provided an opportunity for research scientists and practitioners to meet, present, develop their ideas, and provoke conversations on subjects pertaining to fisheries oceanographer, including, and this includes the US Arctic as well.

So, you can visit the EcoFOCI webpage for more information at www.ecofoci.noaa.gov.

And looks like we still have folks joining us this morning.

So thank you to everyone who's here.

As we continue this all virtual seminar series, you can find the rest of our lineup via the One NOAA seminar series and also on the NOAA PMEL calendar of events.

We are here every Wednesday at 10 AM, and except for a few occasions today being one of them, and that is through December 16th.

And then we will restart the seminar next [inaudible].

All right, whoever that is, can you make sure you're muted?

Thank you.

So please double-check that your microphones are muted, that you're not using video.

And during the talk, please feel free to type your questions into the chat box.

Jens and I will both be monitoring the chat today.

And then we'll address questions with Julia at the end.

And with that, I'm going to let Jens jump on, and he's going to introduce our speaker.

Jens Nielsen >> Good morning, everyone.

Thank you, Heather.

So it's my pleasure to introduce Julia Grosse.

Julia is a biological oceanographer.

She works a lot with understanding the cycling of organic matter in microbial food webs and generally works for phytoplankton ecology and physiology.

And she approaches this work with sort of a combination of field and laboratory studies, and she uses a lot of special techniques, including compound specific stable isotopes and analysis of amino acids and carbohydrates.

Julia is currently a postdoc at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany.

And right now, a lot of her work focuses on the Arctic and I'm sure that's what we'll hear about in a minute.

Prior to joining GEOMAR, Julia did her PhD at NIOZ, which is in Yerseke, Holland.

And here she studied resource limitation and biochemical composition changes in marine phytoplankton.

Prior to that, Julia spent time at a couple of different places, including Georgia Tech, Baltic Research Center in Warnemünde, and University of Rostock.

Julia, thank you very much again for doing this, and I will give the virtual floor to you.

Julia Grosse >> Well, thank you guys for having me.

Um, I hope you can all see my presentation and hear me. Good morning, good evening, good day, wherever you are.

I'm currently in Germany, and I will be talking about

um, my experience in the Arctic.

So, um, maybe you have heard about it, the Big MOSAiC Campaign, which was a big endeavor that was actually planned for more than 10 years.

And it started last year in September, and it actually finished this year in October.

And MOSAiC is an acronym, and it stands for Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate.

Um, the main idea was to take the research vessel Polarstern,

drive it into the Arctic

when it was still possible based on the ice situation, anchor it there on an ice floe, and then do just continuous measurements for an entire year.

And, I think this picture very well sums it all up and it was a beacon of light in the darkness.

I was a participant of, like, two, which covered the time between, um, on the Polarstern, between the middle of December last year, until the beginning of March this year.

So, what was the whole motivation behind the MOSAiC campaign?

Well, there is rapid change in the Arctic.

I guess you all have heard about the Arctic amplification but there's a lack of observations, lots of observations, that are taking place in the summer months, but there's almost no data from the winter months.

There have been a lot of drifting stations from the Russians.

But they have been abandoned due to the ice melt.

They didn't feel safe anymore.

There has been the Tara Ocean and the Tara Arctic in 2006 to 2008.

And then an endeavor by the Norwegians.

You can see a picture there they were there overwintering with a hovercraft.

Um, yeah, but that's basically all the winter data that we have.

The current model predictions are relatively poor, and of course, there's emerging operational management needs, for example, can we take the northern sea route instead of the existing southern one?

So those were some of the motivations.

And a year-long expedition was very international, so we had more than 20 nations that participated.

It was very interdisciplinary.

So it started out to be focused heavily on atmospheric science.

But we also had teams covering ice physics, ocean physics, biogeochemistry.

And then the ecological studies where I was part of.

Um, it was a very multi-scale expedition so we had the ship and the central observatory based around it.

What we did ice stations and process scale studies in, well, in our case, more like 1 or 2 kilometers away.

Then we had a distributed network that was set up in less than 50 kilometers around.

So there were some ice stations, lots of buoys that did ocean measurements and several weather stations that were, some of them were visited frequently.

But most of them, just measured remotely dense and send data via satellites.

And then, of course, that all came together with other Arctic buoys satellites.

There was a airplane campaign

that was also part of MOSAiC campaign.

And then we had a few, well, supposedly, a few collaborating research vessels, but that was due to the pandemic, not as successful as it was planned.

So, on the on the right side of my slide, you can actually see the cruise track in gray.

So, we started the campaign started in Tromsø, Norway in September last year.

And then the ship moves, or steamed all the way into into the ice, they were looking around for flow.

And once they had one, they just anchored it.

And the ship started drifting.

Um, too...

So, the first leg, which was the first two months did about this little piece here.

Ah, then the second leg we came, and we did something like this part.

Then the third leg arrived in March, and they actually went all the way down here in three months.

And then due to the pandemic the icebreakers to re-supply people and other supplies, they couldn't actually get there.

Also, Polarstern had to leave the floe behind. 

They moved they went to Svalbard, exchanged people, then you can see this little green, little gray track here is actually where the, where the ice floe basically moved itself, within this, two or three weeks that it was abandoned.

Then the ship returned back for the fourth leg here in blue.

Um, and measured as much as they could, until the floe actually broke apart.

In early July, they recovered lots of the distributed network and then decided to head back north.

So that's this other gray transit.

Um, up north via the North Pole to get back and investigate a few more freezing processes.

Um, before in late September they actually packed up, moved back all the way to Bremerhaven.

Yeah, the expedition was finished, and before I get into, into my leg, to the winter leg, I just want to show you one more picture from the MOSAiC track.

And this is actually the North Pole.

How it was in early August this year.

So it was not covered completely nice anymore.

They were there in just 5 or 6 days and I think it's a very impressive and very sad picture.

But now let's go back to just the expedition itself.

It started in Norway with a big media and, um, farewell party, lots of people giving speeches, um, and then [inaudible] left Tromsø together with the Akademik Fedorov, which is research icebreaker from the Russians and they ended out to find the floe.

It was very difficult in the end, they only had like, one suitable floe that was thick enough to enter or to to use, and the Fedorov was also there.

So, so, this is what they did.

They went on different ice floes, check the, the thickness which was, I think, like 60 centimeters or less.

So that's not a floe you want to put a lot of equipment on.

Um, but then once they found their suitable floe, they, they were unpacking so you can see here parts of the meteorological tower.

Um, then, in the back, a power supply.

Someone always had to be on bear guard watch.

And they spend the first 3 or 4 weeks to just set up the camp and get it into operational mode.

While the, the Fedorov was driving around, setting up this distributed network.

And they also had a summer summer school onboard with some early career scientists and lots of media attention, of course.

Yeah, and they were starting to get the measurements.

The continuous measurements started in the end of October.

And they were measuring until mid-December, but we already had to arrive in Tromsø in the end of November.

So there, we have two days of safety training.

Here, you can see, uh, we had to jump into the fjord there and use and try our ice picks to get on that board.

And I tell you, those suits are not leak tight.

So, it's very cold.

Also, yeah, the two days included also how to set up all the emergency equipment that we had, like tents and stoves and everything else, um, how to use the, uh, radio, how to communicate over radio, and how to escape from a helicopter in case it has to do an emergency water landing.

Um, and of course, we got about two big bags, full of clothes that we were wearing during the during the expedition.

Then we boarded the Kapitan Dranitsyn which is a Russian coastal icebreaker.

And you can see this picture was taken at about 10 in the morning and this was as bright as it got.

So, even by then, the sun didn't even, um, rise above the mountains.

Yeah, and that would be our home for the next three weeks.

That was the estimated time that it would take us to get to the Polarstern.

And, well, for the first five days, we actually anchored in the Fjord of Tromsø due to bad weather.

But, it was also an opportunity to see the Northern Lights, which was really beautiful.

And then we set out across the Bering Sea.

And, then, that point, the sun, like, it was basically dark, and, uh, we met the first ice, and we just followed our searchlights, and, yeah, already started to experience the continuous darkness.

Then, we finally arrived, um, right on schedule.

We could park right next to the production, and interesting, or cool to see it so that you can see the black line here is our fuel line, so, we're pumping diesel.

You can see the anchor lines which anchored the ship to the ice floe.

And you can see this little hut over here, which is the stern bear guard watch, so, the ship had a system like an infrared system to monitor for polar bears.

But due to the position of the chimney, it did not cover the stern.

So, someone had to do two hour shifts in the back there.

We had a great logistics team to make sure there's no polar bears coming from the, from this part.

Right, so, I was part of the Team ECO, and usually when I go on a cruise, I have like 1 or 2 main responsibilities.

And this just repeats itself over and over.

You're just trying to finish up one station before you hit the next one.

But on this group, that was completely different.

So the team was structured in a way that everyone had their own research project.

There was time allocated for taking care of that.

But we also sampled a lot of core parameters like nutrients and POC, DOC.

All those parameters that we all need to interpret our data.

And that actually included also, for the oceanographers to go onto the ice and do some ice core drilling, so that was our Monday schedule.

On Tuesday we went to Ocean City to sample shallow acidity down to 250-ish meters.

And yeah, so the little blue tent in the corner up here, this is Ocean City.

So we had also a Balloon Town and Met City, but actually, it was just little tiny huts or tents like that.

Um, the round image on the top is actually the inside of that Ocean City tent, so we could fit a few people in, but not much more.

Um, so we took samples...we obtained samples from there.

On Wednesday, we had to process the ice cores that were melting on Tuesday.

They had to be, they, the water, had to be sub parsed, and then we also mainly filtered for a lot of different parameters.

We had two days for CTDs to the ocean floor and for nets, so multinets and ring nets and those kinds of things.

Um, but due to the safety drills that the crew had to do every Friday, Friday was cut kinda short.

So, we had Saturday as a backup day, but Saturday was also like ROV nets.

Like seen on the, on the right.

And we also had a project that was looking at fish.

So they would set out longlines once or twice a week.

Um, and yeah, we didn't catch a single fish.

Then Sunday was not a day off.

We did data entry preparation for the next week, and lots of team meetings.

And um, so this was my fourth expedition on Polarstern.

We usually do summer cruises in Fram Strait between Greenland and Svalbard.

And what happens there is that we get a call, let's say, like, OK, CTDs on deck in 20 minutes, and then you'll just show up in the CTD hangar and get your water.

This time it was a lot different.

Instead of requiring like two people from the deck crew, one on deck and one in the winch room, we had like six of them helping us out.

And we had to be three people from the science department on deck, as well as three people or four people on the ice.

And the reason was that we didn't have the lighting bar, which puts the CTD right next to the ship, into the water.

But there was a lot of ice build-up.

So it would have required to drill like a 4 or 5 meter hole to get the CTD in.

And so they decided to put a hole, like five meters away from the ship.

And use that as the CTD hole.

And to do that, we actually had to put the winch on the train and then get the CTD into the water that way.

So that already required two people from the deck, proved just two, coordinating, on drive those two machines.

And then we had to cover the CTD with this nice red cover that had a glowing, like a hot or warm air tube going into it, to make sure that none of the sensors froze before we got it in and out of the water.

Um, and then we had the people on the ice that received the CTD.

We had to make sure that the frame of the red cover was on those wooden planks instead of going into the water but that the CTD went into the water.

And, um, yeah, so that took, if we were good, like half an hour to just get the CTD in or out.

And then the cover would be put on like the little heater that you can see there.

And then when we got to the floe in December and took it over from the leg one people, they just had it covered by this wooden plank.

And we very quickly realized that it would take us an incredible amount of time and manpower to just keep the hole open.

Um, so, we had heavy equipment like chainsaws, and stuff like that, but in the end, we decided to put a tent over it and heat it up to just about above freezing

to keep the hole open and the time we spent on cleaning it very minimal, and that worked out pretty well, actually.

Yeah.

And then on the way back, the CTD had to be accompanied, like it got out of the cover and we had to actually have hot air blow on it so the, the sensors wouldn't freeze.

We still have problems with the nozzles being frozen, so no water would come out, it took a while.

You can see then our tent solution there on the right and another problem we had was that the CTD in Polarstern would not be working when the temperatures outside was below -30 degrees, which was, uh, an insurance issue.

So, it would have still work below -30, but they didn't allow us to use it.

Um, just to give you a brief overview unlike that we actually measured something that there are some results, I plotted the salinity in the temperature and

I will come to the, I will come to the temperatures once again later.

So you can see a drift plot, how we drifted further north.

And then, um, it's a, it's a time axis there

where temperature and salinity, and, yeah, you can basically see that it's a low salinity in the upper 30 or so meters, and very low temperatures in the upper 80 or so meters.

And then a very specific feature that we found was like

this thermal maximum at about 230, 250.

And then later, weakening to 270 meters.

And that's actually the temperature maximum of the Atlantic water that flows into the central Arctic Ocean.

Um, so I, myself was also responsible for bacterial biomass production.

So, for the radioactive band, and um, yes.

So that's what we measured right on board.

And it's just crude data but we could measure something.

The rates were a lot lower than what we usually find in the Fram Strait but at least we could, there is bacterial activity there in the midst of the winter.

And also all the way down to about 100 meters.

Um, we also had a lot of net tows so we found a lot of high biodiversity.

Jellyfish, some copepods, uh, other crustaceans.

And you can actually see the nets.

Oh, what, how much was in the nets on those pictures.

So, it was actually a lot, and they were, they were feeding.

They were reproducing, they were happily swimming around and very active, actually.

That's actually something that we didn't actually expect.

Then, of course, we had Christmas.

I don't know if any of you ever had spend time, like Christmas on a research vessel.

It was still a working day.

But we had a nice reception by the captain and the officers, lots of good food, secret Santas.

Yeah, was actually some fun time, too.

And then we had lots of activity on the ice.

So, oh, something that we didn't expect, we had a lot of lead openings.

So here you can already see how it's of freezing over again and all the frost flowers and, um.

We took this opportunity to also do some experiments and measurements on like how the leads are actually freezing over again.

For example, those are the physical oceanographers and they are actually having a CTD on a fishing rope, uh, on one of those leads and, um, yeah.

What also happened with this ice activity is, here, you can see the lead on the, on the right.

The Ski-Doo on the left and then the Ski-Doo tracks that we made like a day before, and you can see how the ice just pushed over it and piled up pressure ridges.

And, yeah, actually, there was an incident where we were trapped on on the other side of the lead and everything was de-forming.

So, we actually had to climb a few of us over one of those building up pressure ridges.

Yeah, this was another lead that was opening.

It was about 200 meters wide.

And in case you're wondering, this is our helicopter, the exposure time is just too long.

Um, that was flying by.

And there's still lots of open water.

And the problem with this one was that it shifted our second-year ice site by about 800 meters, and it took a week to get access again to it.

So, yeah, there was also weeks where we didn't have to do ice coring, because we couldn't access the ice core site.

Yeah, this is, uh, um.

Infrared picture from the helicopter, and mark in the middle here is the Polarstern, and then you can see our little emergency runway that we constructed, and all the yellow and slightly orange parts is like open water.

And, um, oops, I think this one over here is the lead that I just showed you.

So, there was massive movement in the ice during those few days.

Um, yeah, charismatic mega-fauna, everyone wonders about that.

We had polar bear guards all the time.

Like each group that was outside had to have one with a rifle.

And during working hours outside, some, like, one person from the science team had to be on the bridge

and just watching around, making sure there's no polar bear, but we were not,

well, I guess, not very lucky in that case that we saw a polar bear.

We only had visited visit from this one.

And he was actually so shy that he only showed up on this one picture, which is our remote sensing site.

So, equipment that is usually installed on satellites and um.

So the person responsible for that site, he was just looking at the data in the morning and was like, something is off.

So, he went back to those pictures and we figured out what happened to the equipment.

The bear didn't actually break anything.

He just shifted one of the equipment, and then he didn't trip over any wires.

He just stepped over it.

So it was a very cautious polar bear, and of course, everyone was sad that we didn't see it, him or her.

Um, someone who was giving us trouble was this little guy, very cute.

But maybe you can see the little blue speck on the white fur.

This is not actually a problem with the picture.

This is a piece of our data cable that he chewed through.

So he was causing some problems just chewing on cables and a huge group of us spend an entire morning outside and swiping all the cables.

We had all the data cables and all the electricity cables, the diesel to make sure that maybe he doesn't bite anymore cables.

Then, yeah, all the data cable, the broken data cable had to be brought back to the ship and repaired.

And then taking back, taken back out, which was, of course, a massive undertaking.

Yeah, it was very cold.

So, this is what people looked like after being outside for two hours.

Um, and, yeah, it was dark, and it was cold, and every once in a while, we got this message "device is approaching minimum operation temperature."

It will turn off because it's too cold.

The average temperature was -26 degrees C or -32 degrees Fahrenheit.

The temperature range was pretty significant from like minus, or from like 15.3 Fahrenheit to -36.8 Fahrenheit.

And this was not just the highest and the lowest, but we also saw massive changes in temperatures within just a few hours.

So from like -10 to, from 15 to like -25 in just a few hours, which of course impacted our CTD working time.

So there was a few days where we just had to sit around and wait and hope that the number on the screen went up.

And you can see like a screenshot from, from the ship.

There it was -37.8 degrees Celsius.

But, of course, at the wind speed of 10 meters per second, we got the wind chill temperature, and that was actually -71.

So it was very cold, just to sum it up.

What was also interesting with the temperature was that the ship measurements were done next to the helicopter hangar at like 20 meters or so height.

But sometimes it was colder on the ice.

So there was a big debate then.

Which temperature do we take to decide if we, if we launched the CTD or not, or should we get it out of the water now, or?

So what shall we do?

And I'm glad I wasn't the one who had to make the decision.

Yeah.

So this is our drift track.

You can see the little dots, it's like 1 dot per day.

And then the colors actually reflect the speed that we hacked.

That we were drifting.

And then, yeah, the big straight line we actually started drifting in a straight line north about the time that the three people left Tromsø.

Um.

And.

That was significant, because they had a hard time catching up with us.

And this is also where we reached the furthest northern point, 88 degrees north and 36 seconds, units, sorry.

And then you can see, yeah, that the gray line is the TARA drift from 2007.

And you can see how the drift usually does, like, little loops and circles.

Um, just to put that in numbers, the total drift drag was like 336 nautical miles in 12 weeks.

The net distance was only 219 nautical miles due to those loops and circles.

We set the new world record for the northernmost drifting vessel in winter.

And it was only a 84 nautical miles from the North Pole.

And if we could have decided on the three people to go on the helicopter, we would have probably taken a flight up there.

Why not?

Yeah.

So, the next three people were supposed to come in mid-February and relieve us.

That was their planned route.

And this picture, you can already see how broken up, and the ice was, at least in the south, um hmm, that there were massive leads leading up towards the north.

This is just the Kapitan Dranitsyn, so they, they were supposed to come back and relieve us, and each dot represents like one hour.

And you can see that sometimes they just didn't, they just didn't make any progress at all.

And also, what you can see on this picture very nicely is all those big leads that were unfortunately, going in the wrong direction.

So they were hoping for a superhighway to come and pick us up.

But it wasn't there.

And then, of course, so it took them longer and longer to try and catch up.

Every night, we would wait for the graphs representing the fuel issue.

You can see how the fuel consumption in the beginning of the plot, the red and blue lines.

It's, like, relatively low, and then once they hit the ice, they were increasing the fuel consumption.

But then unlike day 5 and 6, like the distance that they traveled decreased more and more and more.

They even had to take a break or so, um, because the pressure was too high and they wouldn't have gotten anywhere.

And the, the right graph actually shows the volume of fuel that they still have left.

So by the time we got this graph, they already had run out of heavy fuel, and there, the remaining total is very much, uh, went towards the 50, 50 line.

Which was, of course, a problem for us because we assume that we would need at least half the fuel to return back to Tromsø.

We haven't even talked about the food issue, because they were already two weeks longer on their approach from a total of six weeks.

It took them already five weeks to get there.

So we weren't even thinking about how much food they would leave for us, for the return trip, and we would have to assume that our return trip takes as long as their trip to get to us.

So that was very uncertain times.

But they finally made it on the day that we could actually see the horizon again.

They had to park about 800 meters away.

It was still -40 degrees Celsius...Fahrenheit.

And they started with the [inaudible] and pulleys to exchange, um, all the gear, which took about a week and then we finally moved over and returned or made our return journey.

Um, when like three people took over, they had about three weeks of science planned, due to their delay and they were supposed to fly out in the beginning of April.

And due to the pandemic, they actually came home in like mid-June.

So they, yeah, they didn't bargain for that either.

So we, we [inaudible].

We finally saw the sun again coming over the horizon.

There's still lots of ice ridges and some of our progress was slow, but we were lucky to find some of those super leads.

So, every once in a while, for an hour or two, we could go like 6, 7 knots, um, which was pretty cool.

And we saw our polar bear, filled out was the leg two polar bear.

The Russians actually stopped the ship so he could come close.

And I think we have like a million of those pictures from that one polar bear, compared to the one picture of the, of the ice camp polar bear.

Um, then of course, as I said, we had a few problems.

So in the middle of nowhere, in the high Arctic, we met a second Russian icebreaker for about a week to pump some heavy fuel to make it back to Tromsø.

They also gave us some food.

And then due to the pandemic, we had to do more or less, Russian-issued quarantine for two weeks, before they actually let us go to Tromsø.

By that time, we were still allowed to get into the port of Tromsø.

And because of all the air, airports that had closed down, the AWI actually gave us a charter flight to Germany which was very nice, especially two-thirds of the people were Germans so all we had to do is to take a train or car home.

And the international people also made it home.

So with that, I just want to thank you again for being here and thank the MOSAiC team or such a great time.

And I'm open for your questions.

Heather Tabisola >> Oh my goodness, wow, Julia, thank you so much for sharing all that.

[Inaudible, overlapping voices]

Who..?

Jens Nielsen >> Kara.

Heather Tabisola >> That you've muted your, unless that's you, Jens. Sorry...

Jens Nielsen >> It wasn't me. [Laughs]

Heather Tabisola >> [Laughs]

Jens Nielsen >> Caller 1.

Heather Tabisola >> I can't, they're not.

Sorry, I'm scrolling.

Yeah.

Ah, there we are.

Jens Nielsen >> Caller 10.

Heather Tabisola >> Sorry, Jens. Jens, can you put on your video?

Do you have video?

Jens Nielsen >> I do. I thought I did put it on.

Here we go.

Heather Tabisola >> Great.

[Inaudible] Q&A today, so.

Jens Nielsen >> Yeah, thank you very much, Julia.

Everybody, please put in questions in the chat.

While we wait for that, I can start with one you showed that picture of, you called it the sad Arctic North Pole, there was like I assume you meant very little ice.

Julia Grosse >> Yeah.

Jens Nielsen >> I guess a lot of data is still being analyzed but are there sort of some some big takeaways from from the expedition that that really stands out to you or the or the team?

Changes in ice or things you,

climate, but also just sort of are the things that you really didn't expect?

Julia Grosse >> So I think we didn't expect as much ice movement and lead opening as we had.

So we had people from the SHEBA Expedition was like 20 years ago.

They were like, yeah, yeah, there's like we had one lead, and it froze over, but we had continuously lead openings.

And so the temperature of the ocean underneath is like -1.7 degrees or something.

So about 30 degrees Fahrenheit.

And the temperature, like the air temperature, is much lower.

So there was a lot of efog, I guess, coming out.

And.

So the atmospheric people said that this has got to do a huge, it has a huge impact on the, on the energy budget.

From an ecological standpoint.

Well, we told that everything is kind of dormant and sleeping, and not much is going on.

But we did actually find activity, bacterial activity, the zooplankton activity.

We did see a seal.

So, we did also see [inaudible] we didn't catch any, but there were still life up there.

Um.

Yeah.

And I think they had, like there was a lot of models beforehand that predicted our drift corridor, but also how fast we would drift.

And I think no one expected us to drift as fast as we did, so by the time that we left [inaudible] we were already across the predicted line for May.

So the ice is drifting much faster.

Jens Nielsen >> Right.

Thanks.

And we have a couple of questions.

Heather asks, "What's the one thing you wish you packed but didn't, and vice versa, the one thing you packed, but didn't need all?"

Julia Grosse >> Although, the what I should, like, I could have packed a lot less clothes. So that the AWI, they gave us huge duffel bags.

And I wouldn't have needed all those sweaters that I took.

And the thing that I wish I packed, oh, that's a tricky one, because I've been, I've been there so many times so I had my own laundry line to hang my clothes because it's very dry air.

So if you put your laundry out there, you have a nice, reasonable air.

And of course we already got emails from the people onboard telling us what we should bring.

So like two days before we left Tromsø, they were like bring more hand and foot warmers.

So a bunch of us were like, OK, where do we get hand and foot warmers in Tromsø?

So we bought like all the supplies of that from one of those stores.

Yeah.

Jens Nielsen >> Thanks.

We got another question here from Kyle.

It says, "Most of the aerial pictures were taken by drones, helicopter, airplanes, etc.

If the drone was used, any difficulty operating in cold temperatures?"

Um, probably, I don't know. That was, um.

So we had a camera crew with us.

Um, they were, they were using those drones.

I don't think they had problems flying it, that might have been, like an optics problem.

I know that the helicopters had problems at very low temperatures.

Um, I think the chief pilot was like, we don't really want to fly below -35 degrees C.

And like all the drone scientific work was only happening on nights 3, 4, and 5, because of the darkness.

Jens Nielsen >> Right.

Julia Grosse >> Like I know [inaudible] was warmer.

Jens Nielsen >> Yeah. Ah!

Let's see here.

We got one from Colleen.

She says, "Wow, what an adventure! Seemed kind of touch and go over the fuel, food, and crew change delays. Did you feel safe?"

Julia Grosse >> Yeah, we definitely felt safe.

So they had already plan B and C and D from the beginning.

At that point, it was kind of like, figuring out which, which plan to run.

And, of course, you can always improve communication.

So for us, it was like, uncertainty, rather than not feeling safe.

And we did have enough food.

And toilet paper, which was something, on the way, from Tromsø to the Polarstern that was, actually, if we would not have spent five days in the fjord, we might have run out of that one.

Jens Nielsen >> [Laughs] All right.

I've got one here from Laurie sent to me.

"Maybe you mentioned this, but how big was the ship?"

So I'm assuming the Polarstern.

"How many scientists are on board and how many crew?"

Julia Grosse >> Oh, yeah, that's a good question.

So they reduced the crew a little bit for, for the drift because we were not steaming.

Usually, it's, like 45 ship's crew, and 55 science crew.

But that also includes the German Weather Service and the helicopter pilots.

And this time it was like 60 science crew and about 40 for the Polarstern.

Jens Nielsen >> And here's one from John Martin.

"Was the Northern Light display continuous or just intermittent?"

Julia Grosse >> So I figured that the Northern Lights look much better on pictures than they do in real life.

So.

Jens Nielsen >> Was it common, was it a common occurrence, sort of throughout your..?

Julia Grosse >> So, so we saw them in Tromsø and also on the way back and forth, but to see them on Polarstern, we were actually too far north to see them.

There was one occurrence where we did see where we did see them, which was actually a five minute discussion, if there are clouds or Northern Lights, or what the hell is going on.

So someone would take out the camera, and take a picture, and we will check if it's green.

But yeah, we were actually too far north to see them there.

Jens Nielsen >> Right. I want to start a little bit back to the size of the ship.

So I remember reading Ernest Shackleton's sort of famous book about I think his ship is called Endurance, if I remember correctly, where they basically get stuck in the ice, they don't plan to, in end the whole ship gets crushed.

I assume, well, I know Polarstern is much bigger, but was there any measures or concerns about the movement of the ice and pressure building up even for a ship that size or is it not, not a worry?

Julia Grosse >> No, no, this is, this is not a concern at all because it's a, it's an icebreaker.

So, that's what it does.

I was told it can break ice up to eight meters or so.

So, that was like, we've held shifts, like, like the, the, the ice would just move underneath the ship and lift the ship up.

So, that's based on the construction of the ship.
 
The only worry that we and the leg after us had was the anchor lines.

So, if you put too much tension on them, then they might snap.

And that could be dangerous.

So, I think they actually had that on like [inaudible], so much ice movement, that one of the anchor lines actually snapped.

Jens Nielsen >> Got another question here from Alan, here, Mearns.

He says, "Are there any ice islands up there these days like in the 1960s?"

Julia Grosse >> Oh, you mean the Russians?

Yeah, they used to have those drifting camps, I think, until, like, the early 2000s.

But then they also realized that they're melting.

And they abandoned the data, yeah.

I think they are also looking into, like, pontoons or whatever they're called, like those floating ship kind of things.

So basically a Russian MOSAiC.

Jens Nielsen >> Thank you, Julia.

Um, I don't see...Oh! There is one here.

Shaun says, "Were there any signs of humanity further north than you expected?"

Julia Grosse >> Uh, no, we didn't, we didn't see any human impact.

I mean, it's like snow-covered ice over an ocean.

We did do some sample-takings for microplastics, and that kind of thing, but I don't, I don't know what the results are.

I know that we were more than a thousand miles away from the nearest settlement.

And the closest human beings were the people on the ISS actually.

I think they were only 400 miles or so.

Jens Nielsen >> And Heather asks, "What is your favorite memory from the trip?"

Julia Grosse >> Oh, there are many.

So, um, because the science was so diverse, I was also looking into atmospheric science.

So, I was doing, I was, I was allowed to drive the Ski-Doo around.

That was pretty cool, um, and my niece was born during that time.

So, I, I actually made her her own radiosonde and launched her own weather balloon.

So, that was kind of cool.

Jens Nielsen >> [Laughs] That's great.

Let's see, I am going to limit this to two more so.

I think Brian asked, "What was the major scientific take homes?"

We already kinda covered that.

Julia Grosse >> Yeah. That's going to take, like...Oh. You want... OK. Go ahead.

Jens Nielsen >> No, go...If you have anything to add, please.

Julia Grosse >> Oh. Yeah. No, it's probably going to take a decade or so to work through all this data, and publish papers.

And just maybe, of interest for you, is that all the data will be publicly available, I think, in 2023.

So we have to all publish our data in repositories by then, and then you're free to also use the data.

And yet we're still analyzing samples.

Jens Nielsen >> Let's take one from John Martin, which is very quick.

And then I will finish with one from Laurie Weitkamp.

So, John just asked, "Was there much snowfall, when you were there?"

Julia Grosse >> Yeah, we had a few storms and there was a snow team.

And there was quite a bit of snowfall and there was also a lot of snow drift.

Jens Nielsen >> Ok, and then the last one from Laurie here says, "You mentioned that there were no fish caught.

Given the amount of zooplankton that seems a bit, or maybe that was surprising, wrong bait or just sort of poor luck?

Or weren't there any at all?

And were there any eDNA samples taken to sort of assess that?"

Julia Grosse >> Yeah, we took a lot of DNA samples.

To answer that question.

There were fish.

So on RV's camera footage we could see little polar cod swimming around.

They probably ate the zooplankton and we also saw a seal.

So they probably ate the fish, but yeah I guess they were just using the wrong bait, I don't know.

It's a study to assess how much, if it makes any sense to fish the central Arctic.

So if we can now say that there is no fish in the central Arctic, that might be the reason. I don't know.

That's just from my side.

But yeah, that was not my project.

I can't say anything about the bait.

Jens Nielsen >> We'll have to wait to 2024, whenever the data comes out.

Julia Grosse >> We already have a paper in review that deals with the fish.

So on the leg before us, they were catching Atlantic Cod, actually.

But I think in total, they had two fish that they caught, and there is a paper in press, or in review.

Jens Nielsen >> Ok.

Thank you very much, and I thank everybody for asking questions.

We are very close to the 11 o'clock.

So, happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

Heather Tabisola >> And I'm just, sorry, as well.

I'll close out, Julia, thank you so much.

And just to remember, everybody will be back here on Wednesday, December 2nd, with Kimberly Aiken who's a potential PhD candidate at the Arctic University in Tromsø, Norway.

And she'll be discussing amplifying diverse voices, advocacy for the protection and integrating Indigenous culture, language and knowledge in science and policy.

And if you've missed one of our seminars, or you'd like to re-watch this seminar today, view them on PMEL's YouTube page under EcoFOCI seminars.

These usually take about two weeks to get up.

Two or three weeks depending on how fast we can review them.

So please double-check back there as well.

And those are also listed in the OneNOAA calendar of events.

You can find that link there.

And Julia, again, thank you so so much for joining us.

What an experience experience you had.

I can't imagine being stuck in ice on a boat.

But your pictures definitely took us there for a little bit.

And it was really, really awesome.

So thank you for sharing that with us.

And thank you, everybody, for joining us today.

Everyone have a wonderful Thanksgiving, like Jens said.

Jens, thanks for doing the Q&A and intro today.

And we will see everybody here back next week.

Bye, everyone!