Arctic spring expedition in 2023 to capture the melt onset over Arctic sea ice

 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

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