Polarnight

For the first time, I have experienced the polar nights on the sea ice of the Central Arctic Ocean. During the first part of the MOSAiC expedition, embarked on September 20th, 2019, we lived in complete darkness for almost 3 months, mesmerised by the magic of the polar nights every single day.

Time had a different speed during the expedition. Being on the sea ice, felt like being on a different planet. I was fascinated by the beauty of the landscape, appearing only in the spotlight of our vessel and in our little headlamps, we carried with us to navigate through safely on the moving sea ice.

In September 2019 the German research icebreaker Polarstern embarked on a one-year long scientific polar expedition called MOSAiC, which is the largest Arctic Ocean science expedition of our history. Frozen into the sea ice the ship drifted across the Central Arctic Ocean for an entire year, including the Arctic winter. Polarstern served as the central logistics platform for an international science team and a ship crew of 100 people at a time. 

As an official photographer of the expedition, I spent 3,5  months documenting scientific research and life on Polarstern and 1 months documenting the MOSAiC airborne based expedition from Longyearbyen, Svalbard.

Why is this science expedition important? In the Arctic, the temperature rise has exceeded the average global warming by a factor of two to three, resulting in rapidly declining sea-ice extent and thickness. Unfortunately, scientific data from the central Arctic is still rare, especially during winter months. This climate research mission in a remote and hostile part of the planet, set-up to understand the rapidly changing, yet largely unexplored environment of the Central Arctic Ocean.

As the Arctic is a core driver of the Earth’s climate system, the expedition’s results are crucial to understand and project the regional and global consequences of these changes for human civilization and life on earth.

Story published in The New York Times “Scientists to Drift with the Arctic” on September 19, 2019

Story published in The New York Times “Scientists on Arctic Expedition Choose Ice Floe That’ll be Home for a Year” on October 4, 2019

Story published in The New York Times “Stuck in the Arctic Ice, Dodging Polar Bears. All for science” on November 22, 2019

Story published in The New York Times “Endless Night at -50 Degree: A look at Life on an Icebreaker” on February 7, 2020