Floating in the arms of an icy Mother Nature

October 23, 1998
Web posted at: 2:15 PM EDT

By Environmental News Network staff

The Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Des Groseilliers, frozen in an Arctic ice floe, became the heart of the research station

(ENN) -- Repeating an experiment that was last conducted in 1893, scientists have just concluded an extraordinary study of the Arctic.

Last fall, the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Des Groseilliers sailed up to the Arctic, looking for a good place to park. The ice wasn't as thick as scientists were hoping for, but on Oct. 2, 1997, the ship was officially frozen in and became the heart of Ice Station SHEBA.

Short for the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean, a name that only scientists could dream up, SHEBA was located on a floe that originally was five miles by six miles. The station consisted of a collection of plywood research huts, cold-weather tents, meteorological towers, automatic buoys and stands of instruments surrounding the Des Groseilliers.

The mission of the $19.5 million research effort was to gather data to improve Arctic climate models and, in turn, global forecasts of climate change.

The last ship to sit deliberately in the ice pack for more than a year was the Fram, a Norwegian vessel that was frozen into the ice in 1893 for the purpose of scientific exploration. The Fram drifted for nearly three years before being able to break free. The Des Groseilliers broke free earlier this month on Oct. 11, and scientists are ecstatic over the data collected.

"We've observed the ice, the atmosphere and the ocean over a full annual cycle covering the physical variables in all three systems. We've seen it all: melting, freezing, heating, cooling, ridges, cracks, leads, melt ponds and all kinds of different formations of ice and snow," said Richard Moritz, polar scientist with the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory and director of the SHEBA project office based at the university.

The Arctic ice pack undergoes profound changes every year. In winter, the ice pack is about the size of the continental United States. In summer, there is only half as much ice. Understanding what controls this annual freeze and meltdown is a key to predicting future climate change and assessing the toll of global warming, whether it's natural or human-caused. In addition to data scientists collected on the floe itself, data was gathered by sensors on six spacecraft, by researchers using four different kinds of aircraft and by a submarine prowling beneath the ice cap.

Mid-July found the station riddled with rivers of open water and melt ponds that had to be crossed to reach research huts and equipment

During the ship's year-long stay, more than 170 researchers, students and technicians worked at the station. Most rotated at regular intervals, however, one American stayed six months straight and one Canadian biologist never left the station.

What do you do for excitement on an ice floe in the Arctic? For one thing, there was always Mother Nature changing the floor plan. On one winter day it took 15 minutes for two pieces of ice to come together at the bow of the ship with enough force to push up a 10-foot tall ridge of ice. During a blizzard in early April the part of the camp with a 70-foot meteorological tower and seven huts migrated a quarter-mile away from the ship -- overnight.

During the summer, the ice floe brought a slowly rising flood of melt ponds, open water and soft surfaces. The team that rode snowmobiles to work areas a half-mile from the ship went from riding to walking the distance, then had to build snow bridges over soft parts so they could walk, then used a rowboat and finally a helicopter -- all in a matter of weeks.

The ice and snow group once got a call on the radio from the oceans group at work on a different part of the floe saying they'd just seen one of the ice monitoring stations float by. And there were the occasional visits from polar bears, who didn't seem to find a makeshift city on ice in the middle of nowhere the least bit surprising.

There was travel, too. The wind and ocean currents moved the ice floe, sometimes at the rate of 20 miles a day. Originally frozen in about 300 miles north of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, the floe traveled 1,000 miles, ending up about 400 miles northwest of where it started.

The scientists are all back home now, poring over their data caches and preparing new models. Current models of the Arctic climate can give vastly different results when considering various scenarios. For instance, some models say doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere (something scientists feel is likely to happen within the next 50 to 100 years) will shrink the Arctic ice pack to half the size today. Others predict it will disappear completely. Scientists are hoping their stays on the ice floe will yield data that will revolutionize the global weather prediction process.

The ice station was funded by the National Science Foundation with support from the Office of Naval Research, Japan, Canada and numerous federal agencies.

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