Today is the first day of the APECS Polar Week, as you already heard of by Valentin last Friday.
And since APECS challenged all of us to share our #PolarNumbers with the world out there, we of course didn’t want to miss this. A Polar Number could be any number one connects to their polar research and adventures, such as the number of expeditions one went on, the year of the first polar bear, the number of ice bergs integrated in a modelling study…
APECS Polar Week 2018, Day One, Polar Number: 1
But as a challenge wouldn’t be a challenge if it wouldn’t be challenging, today’s polar number is not any number but “1“! And the question is what does this number mean in our polar world…?
I’d say 1 is actually quite easy and challenging at the same time. We are 1 group of curious and motivated PhD students, connected by having 1 favourite research area, the Arctic. Today the 1st blog post about the expedition 1 part of us is currently attending was published and for them it is actually the 1st time on a ship in the Arctic.
That was the easy part, more complicated would be to summarize our research topics within today’s Polar Number. Maybe it still counts if I did it with 1 equation:
18 = 5 + 5 + 4 + 3 + 1
We are currently 18 people at ArcTrain Germany,
- 5 working with sedimentary archives
- 5 working with sea ice observations and models
- 4 working with ocean currents
- 3 working with glacier models
- 1 working with bioecology
I could make this more complicated by saying that 2 of the people working with sedimentary archives use it to reconstruct sea ice and 1 to find out about past bioecology. By continuing that I could possibly separate all these topics into tiny parts ending up with an equation of:
18 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1
and I’m not convinced if that might not be cheating…
But to not accidently use up one of the coming Polar Numbers in the challenge, I’ll cut this line of thoughts here and patiently wait for tomorrow’s Polar Number. So stay with us to read more Polar Numbers.
PS. My Polar Number is 76 and connected to my 1st expedition to the Arctic and depending on the coming numbers in the challenge I might share that story with you…
PPS. Since one challenge is never enough, we thought to additionally challenge ourselves and provide you with some Arctic numbers tomorrow…