The AO25 blog: The expedition Arctic Ocean 2025

The research school onboard the research ice breaker Oden has come to an end. In the evening the day before yesterday we did our last research station and deployed a mooring in the marginal ice zone, where the pack ice meets in the open ocean; a permanent buoy under the the surface that is tethered to the ocean floor and will stay there for the next years.

During this week it has become clear that we moved into the autumn freeze up. There is almost no open water around us at all anymore. Where open water was present previously, between the more solid ice floes, the ocean is now covered with a layer of new ice. The polar bears we passed by the other day benefit from the new ice since they don't have to swim from floe to floe. They are excellent swimmers but the water is cold!

Four weeks have now passed and there is less than two weeks left of our Arctic adventure. One can sense that people on board have started to realize this and react differently. Some refuse to think about it while others think about it all the time. This is human nature and the mood onboard is very good but it will be a special moment when we get back.

Over three weeks have gone for this years Oden expedition to the central Arctic Ocean and we have passed the midpoint with less time left than spent. We have managed to take some more sediment samples; the several meters deep samples represents a climate archive that may go millions of years back in time. Also a rare spotting of the sun, this time with two so-called "sundogs".

A little over a week has passed since the research school on icebreaker Oden passed the North Pole and we are now relatively far south but on the other side of the pole which has some weird consequences. While the sun doesn't set, it does vary over the day. Since we are still on UTC time (sometimes called Greenwich Mean Time) this means that where we are now, the sun is the lowest in the middle of our day and vice versa.

A week has passed on the Swedish/Canadian icebreaker expedition to the central Arctic Ocean and late Saturday afternoon we arrive at the North Pole where we stayed until the very early hours of Sunday. Everyone got together on the bridge and as we arrived on the North Pole we cheered eachother with a glass of (alcohol free) bubbles. After the crew had moored us to an ice floes, we were allowed off the ship for some free time and also the mandatory group photo.

The expedition Arctic Ocean 2025, with the research school on the Arctic climate system, is now well under way. We left Longyearbyen last Sunday August 10 under clear-blue skies and sunshine and this stayed with us through yesterday. Late last night we saw the first ice rather far north, and now were continuing north in ice and fog, as is usual along the ice edge this time of the year.