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Expedition overview - did we succeed? An interview with the Chief Scientist Michael Tjernström

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 To make an expedition happen, a lot of planning and collaboration work are required. Even though everything would be ready, it might still not go as planned once the expedition is on-going. The environment in the Arctic challenges the completion of the plan: will the ice conditions be favorable for us this year? How is the weather going to be? Will we be able to observe what we came for? There are many things we can plan for, but in the end the conditions while being out in the Arctic determine what can be accomplished for of the original plans and decisions need to be made based on the available material.  On many of the questions above I could give you an answer to as I together with 37 other scientists took part in this spring’s 6-week long expedition called “ARTofMELT” (8 May to 16 June 2023) and got to experience how this expedition eventually turned out to be. But to get the best insights and thoughts about the progress of the expedition, I interviewed the expedition Chief Scien
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Final week of the expedition – capturing melt onset, leaving the sea ice and visiting Svalbard on the way home

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 I want to start to apologize of not updating my blog the last weeks. I am back home since Friday 16 June, but all the hard work and less sleep on Oden for the last 6 weeks were quite exhausting in the end and I needed some recovery time and sleep (and catching up with all hundreds of work emails and social media stuff) before finding the energy to finalize my blog. But here I am, and I will now tell you and show some nice photos from the last week of the expedition. In the last posting (“ Second icecamp - up to 30 polar bears until now!” ; Posted 12 June), the focus was not only on the research by mainly on the polar bear visits that made our work on the ice quite challenging. I will now return a few days back, starting from Friday 9 th  of June, and include a bit more of the weather and other activities that happened that weekend. Additionally, I will tell you about the journey as we left the sea ice early Monday (12 June) morning, arrived in Longyearbyen, Svalbard on Tuesday eve Jun
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Second icecamp - up to 30 polar bears until now!

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Overview of the icecamp and the main “roads” to the ROV site (to the left) and our met-alley (to the right) taken on Monday 5 June.   This ice camp (see photo above) was built on Monday 29 May and we were still at the same icefloe, 2 weeks later. We have developed a routine schedule for almost every day, but the plan of the day changes due to the ice conditions, weather or polar bears. Sometimes, there are helicopter ice stations planned, drone flights, Helikite or Helipod operations or other ice work conducted on the ice apart from the “regular” ones. You can read about the first snowstorm and the frosty weekend during the first week of the second ice camp in my previous posting (“ First week of the Second icecamp - Icework and its challenges”; posted 8 June).   For this posting, I will continue taking you on a journey through the second week of the second icecamp – with the emphasis on the several polar bear visitors we had during the last week. In fact, the polar bear seen a we
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