Because we have not been granted any ship time to enter the ice from the ship, we heavily rely on the use of our helicopters to reach the ice where we carry out snow and ice thickness measurements, and extract ice cores and water samples for bio-physical analyses back on the ship. In addition, we perform airborne ice thickness surveys with our EM Bird, a torpedo-shaped ice thickness sensor towed 20 m below the helicopter and 15 m above the ice. With the great support of the hard working helicopter pilots and engineers, and despite some poor weather days, we have already sampled eight ice floes and carried out four EM thickness surveys. Evenings and weather days are filled with the processing of our ice samples in the cold laboratory containers on board.

First, preliminary results showed that the snow is only 20 to 30 cm thick and highly metamorphic, and much has been transformed into superimposed ice. This is much thinner than the 70-100 cm of snow typically found in this region in late winter. Below the surface layer of metamorphic snow and superimposed ice we found hints of gap layers and rotten ice, with moderate abundances of sea ice algae. However, these were much less developed than typical for other regions of the Weddell Sea with thinner and younger ice, and attest to the severity of sea ice conditions in our study region. Local ice thicknesses at our coring sites chosen on level ice ranged between 1 m and 2.5 m. However, the airborne surveys showed that ice thicknesses between 3 and 4 m were quite typical overall, including heavily ridged ice. Those large thicknesses are similar to thicknesses observed in 2004 and 2006. They also explain why Polarstern struggled so much to penetrate farther to the south, as the ice was not only so thick but also pressed against the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula by southern winds.

Despite these first successful 1.5 weeks of sea ice sampling we are very disappointed that we are not able to cover larger regions further to the South and East including the Larsen B and C regions where we were expecting to see differences in sea ice melt and biology. There we had plans to study snow on the large iceberg A68, platelet ice indicative of ice shelf melt, and a unique area of multiyear landfast ice covering the inner parts of the Larsen B bay with the biological highly productive platelet ice. However, we are hopeful that we will now be able to continue our observations along a gradient from the inner part of the sea ice cover to the marginal ice zone in the northeast. Here we expect strong increases in the amount of accumulated melt and metamorphic snow, gap layer abundance, and a strong increase of the sea ice associated ecosystem.