Oceanography & Sea Ice NPI

CONNECTING THE DOTS (v2) – Remember how we prepared the layout for our collaborative framework on observations in our Atlantic-Arctic gateway?
While the summer expedition season was all about “collecting the dots”, the time has now come to work together to connect all the dots, and harvest from our efforts in the field. This week, we organized our A-DBO annual meeting hosted by the Institute of Oceanology Polish Academy of Sciences (IOPAN) in Sopot, Poland. With international participants both onsite and online, we put together yet some more pieces in our rather new collaborative framework puzzle.
Within the network we covered some of the Fram Strait and Kongsfjorden key sites several times from May to September. Our first joint scientific summary, connecting physics, chemistry and biology, will therefore be dedicated to this area. The study should be ready in time for our pan-Arctic DBO meeting in March, at the Arctic Science Summit Week in Edinburgh, UK, where our regional observations will be expanded to pan-Arctic perspectives.
Stay tuned for the evolution of these results, and of the A-DBO!

👉https://arcticpassion.eu/adbo/

Norsk Polarinstitutt
UiT Norges arktiske universitet
Havforskningsinstituttet
Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research
Department of Environmental Science at Stockholm University

The Nansen Legacy legacy | After 6 years, the Nansen Legacy project is coming to an end. This week, over 250 project participants and collaborators gathered for a symposium in Tromsø to share results and current knowledge about the Arctic Ocean and the Barents Sea. The symposium mirrored the interdisciplinary nature of Nansen Legacy, with research topics ranging from climate dynamics to small-scale sea ice deformation, from marine mammals to seawater chemistry, and from glacial erosion in the Barents Sea millions of years ago to present-day microbial life in the ocean.

Nansen Legacy has involved 230 researchers from 10 Norwegian institutions and across a wide range of scientific disciplines. 21 expeditions to the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean were conducted on the research vessel Kronprins Haakon and other ships. The Norwegian Polar Institute has been heavily represented in the project both in leadership, research, and logistics.

The project draws to a close, but it will not stop contributing to our shared knowledge about the Arctic. Scientific results based on Nansen Legacy studies will continue to emerge in the coming years, and the massive amounts of data collected will contribute to new studies in the future.

Cover illustration: Frida Cnossen (,
, )
Photos: Øyvind Lundesgaard ()

IN THE SPOTLIGHT: THEODOROS KARPOUZOGLOU | Today, Theo defended his thesis “On the Freshwater in the Fram Strait” at Geofysisk Institutt UiB of Bjerknessenteret and Universitetet i Bergen. Theo started the research for his thesis Norsk Polarinstitutt by joining the annual cruise to the Fram Strait in 2019. Since then, he has worked on the data from the Fram Strait Arctic Outflow Observatory from 2003 to 2020 to construct an improved time series of the freshwater transport in the East Greenland Current.
His contributions of new knowledge on the freshwater dynamics were many and among these that:
❗This freshwater transport declined between 2015 and 2019, while the opposite was expected given the declining sea ice in the Arctic.
❗Up to 40% of the freshwater transport can occur on the East Greenland shelf, which currently is not monitored by moorings.

Theo is a very enthusiastic young researcher, driven and independent and never afraid to ask questions. Congratulations on reaching this milestone and for earning the ph.d. degree!

📷Y. Kern and L. de Steur (NPI)

STORED SAFELY UNDERGROUND | As part of our research, we collect and create vast amounts of data – ship observations, field measurements, satellite data, and model simulations. Managing and storing all these data demands considerable effort and significant physical space.

Some data are stored in-house at the Norwegian Polar Institute, but for very large datasets we use the Norwegian research infrastructure services (NRIS) provided by Sigma2. Here, our data find a secure haven on servers in the Lefdal Mine Datacenter, located between Måløy and Nordfjordeid in Vestland county. This former olivine extraction mine provides high security for the computer systems, has access to plenty of hydropower for the facilities, and can source cooling water from the fjord nearby. In the mine, we find a storage infrastructure called NIRD (National Infrastructure for Research Data), capable of storing a whopping 49 PB of data, equivalent to a staggering 49 million gigabytes, as well as data processing and AI capabilities on the NIRD Service Platform cloud infrastructure ! From 2024, it will also house a new cutting-edge multi-role supercomputer that can be used for climate simulations and AI workloads.

Photos: Sigma2/Lefdal Mine Datacenter AS, with permission.

HOW TO ACCESS THE LANDFAST SEA ICE IN KONGSFJORDEN | In the late 1990s and early 2000s we used snow mobiles to access the landfast sea ice in inner Kongsfjorden, for Norsk Polarinstitutt long-term monitoring and for process studies.
Since then, the sea ice extent in Kongsfjorden has decreased and in most cases direct access to the ice is no longer possible. Instead, we must use small but robust Polarcirkel boats from Ny-Ålesund Research Station to the inner parts of the fjord, where landfast sea ice still can be found during some months in winter/spring.
Navigating in the fjord can be challenging, with changing weather and ice conditions with sea ice mixed with bergy bits from the nearby glaciers terminating into the fjord. The boats carry a science team of 2-4 people, scientific and safety equipment, and on the way back also sea ice samples.

🌐FACE-IT
📷S. Gerland and M.Granskog (Norsk Polarinstitutt)

GETTING READY FOR THE ANTARCTIC SEASON | Last week, several members gathered with colleagues from , , , and in Tromsø to prepare for our upcoming Antarctic fieldwork. The plan is to drill with to observe the ocean below Fimbulisen ice shelf and study how the ice is melting from below to reduce uncertainties on estimates of future sea level rise.
Training on wilderness first-aid and glacier crevasse rescue in the Lyngen Alps east of Tromsø (photo 1) was on the schedule, to safely travel on the ice and stay 40-50 days in a tent-based field camp away from later this year. But also discussing details of the science objectives (photo 2) and testing (photo 3), which will dive below the ice shelf and measure physical, biological, and chemical ocean properties, was useful for bringing the team together.

Photos: Jan Are Jacobsen (1), Tore Hattermann (2), Daniel Lein (3)

BOTH WORK AND PLEASURE | Even during busy field surveys there is often time to capture the majestic seascape and its true inhabitants. Such material may also be helpful for scientific purposes: the sea ice, bird and marine mammal observers onboard appreciate getting extra material to help confirm sightings along the way. These photos are from just a few of the observations made in the marginal ice zone of the Nansen Basin during the last August.

📷 Marika Marnela Norsk Polarinstitutt

WARMING BELOW FIMBULISEN ICE SHELF | The development of melting beneath ice shelves in Antarctica is one of the major uncertainties in predicting future sea-level rise (). This melting can be caused by higher ocean temperatures and changing currents below the ice.

In December 2009, a team of 6 members spent 45 days on Fimbulisen Ice Shelf, East Antarctica, to install an array of three sub-ice-shelf moorings. These moorings were deployed through hot-water-drilled holes below 400 m thick ice. Since then, the moored instruments have continuously measured temperature and velocity of this almost inaccessible part of the world’s oceans.

Since 2016, the data show an increase in temperature and circulation below the ice shelf. At the same time, satellite measurements point to stronger melting, which indicates that the higher ocean temperatures contributed to a thinning of the ice shelf. This will lead to greater ice discharge over time. The shift toward higher temperatures below Fimbulisen is linked to reduced coastal sea ice cover and increased remote winds, which bring warmer water closer to the coast. These winds are projected to increase under global warming, putting a spotlight on East Antarctica as a source for sea-level rise, in addition to West Antarctica, where most of the Antarctic mass loss occurs today.

These new findings have been published by members and collaborators in the journal Nature Geoscience (). Read the paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01273-5

📷 Tore Hattermann (1 & 4), Per Gunnar Gabrielsen (2), Kristen Fossan (3) (all )

FAST, AS IN NOT MOVING | During our annual cruise we spent two days on fast ice at 79°N east of Greenland, collecting various scientific data on the properties of sea ice and ocean in this area. This time of the year, the sea ice is typically heavily melted and covered by ponds which are sometimes melted through. Still, numerous grounded icebergs of Belgica Bank act as anchors holding fast the ice cover in one place.

Norsk Polarinstitutt
CIRFA
UiT Norges arktiske universitet
ESA - European Space Agency

📷 Trine Lise Helgerud, Norsk Polarinstitutt