A Pandemic Journey That Puts Odysseus to Shame

Niubom wouldn’t set foot on land again until the middle of June. By that point, after nearly five months at sea, he would have done almost anything to get back to his wife and his young daughter in St. Petersburg as quickly as possible. He just didn’t expect that would mean biking into Russia from Finland on a folding bicycle he had procured in Germany.

An employee of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Niubom joined MOSAiC to run a seismic system for monitoring tremors in sea ice, and to assist with other ice-related projects. Like most members of the third crew rotation, when he learned he was going to be helping out aboard the Polarstern considerably longer than expected, he took the news in stride.

“In the Arctic, you cannot plan everything as you would like; here you are a hostage to the situation,” Niubom wrote me in an email. And as the pandemic worsened around the world, he tried to see the upside in his situation: “We’re going without masks and gloves with no fear. We are the only ones in the world who would hold football matches, though on ice.” (For this very international team, football, naturally, meant soccer.)

Read: A year on ice

Most people who sign up for polar expeditions do so, in part, because they love working in extreme environments—the more unknown, the better. Taneil Uttal, who led MOSAiC’s atmospheric-research team from mid-December through February, chose a winter shift because she “thought it would be the most interesting, unknown, and extreme” leg of the trip. (Normally, she works as a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado.) Being part of MOSAiC’s winter crew meant working outside on days as cold as –50 degrees Fahrenheit and knowing what to do when polar bears wander into your research camp; it meant working six and a half days a week on a monochromatic moonscape where the sun never rose. People did all that and more: “They would come home and have dinner, and then go skiing and walking on the ice,” she says. “We would have bonfires out on the ice, parties out on the ice. People just loved being out on the ice.”

MOSAiC researchers were prepared to face isolation and harsh conditions. But tossing out years of painstakingly choreographed logistics and keeping their scientific work going amidst a global pandemic presented a new level of challenge. And although Niubom and his colleagues were steeled to stay aboard the Polarstern as long as was necessary, they also had families to return to, families that needed their support more than ever. “Day by day, the awareness of this problem became clearer, and something had to change,” Niubom said.

The pandemic made this hard. At first it seemed like Niubom’s crew might be able to travel home aboard a Swedish icebreaker scheduled to resupply the Polarstern in June. Then, Swedish travel restrictions kicked in, and that vessel was forced to cancel its journey north. After weeks of unsuccessfully attempting to charter icebreaker after icebreaker, MOSAiC’s coordinators drew up an alternate plan: The Polarstern would break free of the ice and travel hundreds of miles south in order to link up with a pair of German vessels. Instead of taking place in mid-April, this maritime crew swap would occur in May.

Even that far into spring, when the darkness and the bitter cold of winter had given way to milder weather and endless sunlight, the ship encountered thick sea ice on its journey south, delaying its arrival by about a week. In early June, it finally managed to break through the southern ice edge and link up with the RV Sonne and the RV Maria S. Merian in waters off the coast of Svalbard, where the swap took place.