You might remember Anouk telling you in her previous post that she and 12 other ArcTrain students are joining the RV Polarstern expedition PS 115.2 as part of the Floating University. Our fellow, normally eagerly writing Damien, is also part of this adventure which is why he hasn’t been writing much lately, as they are currently far away in the Arctic Ocean where the internet connection is highly limited to a few emails per day and some reports for the AWI web page and the Helmholtz Polarstern Blog. If you want to know where exactly they are right now, you actually can track Polarstern’s position!
But you might probably wonder even more, what are our fellow ArcTrainees doing out there in the high north all day? The answer is: a lot of different things.
“[They] split into small groups […] and assist the different scientific teams. [They] take samples from sediment cores brought back from the bottom of the ocean, […] prepare instruments that will measure properties of sea ice,[…] deploy[…] weather balloons for monitoring the properties of the atmospheric column along the ship track. [T]he 13 ArcTrain students are also an ideal work force for the upkeep of the different monitoring programs that run 24/7 on the ship.” –ArcTrain Students: Watch Keepers (Charles Brunette)
The whole story of their adventures can be read directly at the Polarstern blog or right here:
For more information you can also follow the weekly reports about the expedition at the AWI homepage written by the chief scientist.
UPDATE to original post from September 24th: as the RV Polarstern returned to Bremerhaven savely from an exiting and succuessful expedition on October 16th the series of weekly reports are now complete, read them here: No. 1 | No. 2 | No. 3 | No. 4 | No. 5| No. 6