Hi, I'm Dr. Jessie Creamean, and I'm a research scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. I recently returned from Leg I of the MOSAiC Expedition in the Central Arctic. During my several months aboard the icebreaker ship Polarstern, I worked with other scientists to collect thousands of scientific samples. These samples included sea ice, seawater, animals, snow and tiny particles of matter in the air called aerosols. My colleagues and I used (and continue to use!) a wide range of measurements to evaluate how these different components of the Arctic system might be linked.
So how do MOSAiC scientists actually collect samples?
Sea ice samples are collected using a special ice coring barrel and a battery-powered drill. Every week, somewhere between 50 and 100 ice cores are collected to measure properties like ice temperature, thickness, salt content, microbes (bacteria, algae, plankton), nutrients for the microbes, other particles and gases like methane and oxygen trapped in bubbles in the ice. The cores are collected as whole cores or cut up into sections to measure how things change with the depth of the ice.
