Back Again: First deployed buoy from the MOSAiC expedition
After almost two years at sea, the measuring device has landed in Norway
[10. September 2021]
On September 26th, 2019, Marcel Nicolaus, marine physicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), placed an ice buoy on a floe during the passage of the Polarstern to the Central Arctic. It was the first buoy to be sent off during the MOSAiC expedition. It was part of the "Distributed Network," a large buoy network that drifted around Polarstern at distances of up to 50 kilometers and continuously and precisely monitored this area. For almost two years, the buoy was on its way until its journey now ended near Tromsø.
Researchers from the Norwegian Polar Institute were able to collect the buoy from a small rocky island. Along the way, the instrument sent its position data via GPS to show the drift of the sea ice on which the buoy was floating. The Polar Research Institute of China had sent it on the MOSAiC expedition.
Background information on MOSAiC
During the MOSAiC expedition, experts from 20 nations explored the Arctic for an entire year. From autumn 2019 to autumn 2020, the German research icebreaker Polarstern drifted frozen in the ice through the Arctic Ocean. MOSAiC was coordinated by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). In order to make this unique project a success and to obtain the most valuable data possible, more than 80 institutes had pooled their resources in a research consortium. The expedition budget was over 140 million euros.