After 64 days at sea, the RV Polarstern and icy surroundings have officially started to feel like home. I can’t believe how quickly the time has passed, but here we are at the end of MOSAiC Leg 4! A truly special cruise, we witnessed the re-building and complete break-down of an ice camp, the peak and end of the spring under-ice bloom, and were the last to sample from the original MOSAiC floe before that singular, well characterized piece of ice (chosen all the way back in last October!) finally reached the marginal ice zone, and the end of its life as a contiguous floe. It’s really quite incredible to have had the opportunity to contribute to this astounding time series. As part of this expedition, over 200 individual scientists have worked on this one piece of ice, following its drift across the Arctic. Even if we cannot determine the full scope of this project or see all the results just now – it is clear that these data will have an impact for generations to come and, especially as a student, I feel so lucky to have contributed to this legacy.

When we first arrived at the MOSAiC floe, we were very excited to find enough of it intact to re-establish the Central Observatory ice camp. Very soon, versions 2.0 of all the ice “cities” began popping up across the floe and the science began in earnest. However, every day we had new reminders of the fact that we were decidedly in the Arctic melt season. Melt-ponds became a dominant feature and often, new roads and pathways had to be forged on the fly to get to sampling locations. For example, starting at around 1.5 m the first week, our last first year ice cores were only 90 cm long.

These melt-dynamics not only provided physical challenges to working on the ice, but also scientific ones as well. How to capture this fresh-water lens and study the impacts of such surface stratification on the biomass blooming beneath the ice? This stratification was seen most clearly in the lead systems surrounding the ship. After several surveys, we were able to characterize 3 clear layers – surface freshwater, a green algal layer (brackish salinities), and the underlying seawater. Over time, the living layer shoaled and went from a happy photosynthetic green, to a clearly dying, particulate organic matter greenish/brown. Capturing this bloom transition was quite exciting for us and I look forward to analyzing how the microbial community in these layers evolved.

In addition to these opportunistic events, Alessandra D’Angelo (PhD, URI) and I were happy to continue progress on the core MethOx project work, started by Jessie Creamean (PhD, CSU) on Leg 1, and Jeff on Leg 3. When conditions allowed, we were lucky enough to have nearly daily CTD casts from the Polarstern rosette (thank you Team Ocean!) and were therefore never in want of water. With both of us on board we were able to maximize sampling and analysis, collecting almost 278 unique samples for the core project work alone! We measured weekly seawater profiles for microbial community structure in conjunction with ambient methane concentrations/isotopes and ran experimental samples to study potential oxidation/production rates of methane using elevated methane in select incubations.

BUT – it’s not over yet. Even as I now take this time to reflect on Leg 4, we are quite busy with preparations for Leg 5 where we will head north and witness the re-freeze of the Arctic fall! And although it will be bittersweet to part from our Leg 4 colleagues… the Akademik Tryoshnikov has arrived and the handover must begin. I look forward to continuing on as the Bowman Lab/MethOx Project representative on MOSAiC Leg 5 and can’t wait to see where the RV Polarstern takes us next!

Operating an international expedition in the remote central Arctic would always be a logistically taxing endeavor. Operating an international expedition in the remote central Arctic during a global pandemic is that much more challenging. But through the incredible perseverance of a delayed Leg 3 team and hard work from the dedicated logistical teams at the Alfred Wegner Institute in Germany, MOSAiC Leg 4 is underway!

Our NSF funded project work on MOSAiC will be carried out on this leg by URI Post-doc Alessandra D’Angelo and myself. In a reshuffling of plan operations, I found myself headed North almost a month earlier than expected (and for her almost a month later). On May 1, 2020, approx. one hundred scientists and crew began two weeks of quarantine in a local hotel in Bremerhaven. For the first week we were in total isolation within individual hotel rooms. Meals were brought to our door by the incredible hotel staff. Upon beginning our individualized quarantine, we took two tests, the first test on our arrival and the second one seven days later. We were all to remain in individualized quarantine until the results of our second coronavirus test came back.  Thankfully, everyone tested negative and after seven long days we entered Phase 2 – group quarantine. Even weeks and 3,000 km away from meeting with the Polarstern, MOSAiC Leg 4 had finally begun. Tentatively at first, we emerged from our rooms to gather for meals, planning, and perhaps most importantly, safety briefings. While we were able to be around each other, we still practiced strict social distancing precautions.

After another 10 days, and negative test results for all, we began our journey Northward on the R/V Maria S. Merian and R/V Sonne to meet with the MOSAiC workhorse, R/V Polarstern. While overall lovely research vessels, the MS Merian and Sonne are not icebreakers, meaning the Polarstern would need to travel south of the ice edge to refuel and make the personnel exchange. Therefore, all ships coordinated to meet in Adventfjorden, Svalbard. It required a lot of time, but it was a beautiful journey. Due to some unexpected ice-pressure preventing southerly travel we ended up reaching the designated meeting point (near Longyearbyen, Norway) almost 2 weeks earlier than Polarstern! I spent most of the time planning, catching up on some coding, and working out in the many group sporting activities being held on board, all in prep for the labor-intensive ice activities. (Zumba and yoga are of course perfect analogs for pulling sledges of equipment across slushy sea ice…)

Once the Polarstern finally arrived in Adventfjorden, a flurry of handover activities commenced. We met with the Leg 3 team, explored the labs, reviewed protocols, and heard all about their experience on the ice. Prior to departing the MOSAiC ice floe, there was a dynamic shift in the ice leading to some sampling sites splitting from the rest. This, however, is not surprising given its fast trajectory south and the onset of the summer melt-season. The ice drift (which can be tracked here in real time) has brought the MOSAiC floe to approximately 82º latitude, air temperatures mostly remain above freezing, and surface water is currently measured at -1.7ºC (warm for under-ice). With polar summer in full swing and such exciting ice dynamics, I look forward to getting back to the floe and tracking the ecological changes through this transition! But first, we must get there. I’m hoping to utilize this next phase of transit to explore the R/V Polarstern. Since it will be my new home for the next ~4.5 months, I suppose I should learn how to find my way from the lab to the mess hall without getting lost…

Our journey began in Tromsø, Norway in the innocent days of January when COVID-19 seemed like a regional rather than global problem. We had several Chinese expedition members on Leg 3, but they all made it out just fine and – though they were concerned about the situation back home – we figured things would improve in due time. After a week of safety training we were transported to the Russian icebreaker Kapitan Dranitsyn for what we thought would be a 2-3 week voyage to the Polarstern.

A lot of thought and effort went into determining how the MOSAiC scientists and crew would reach Polarstern throughout the drift. During the winter a conventional icebreaker of Dranitsyn‘s class is not the best way to reach a location in the central Arctic, however, it was the best among the affordable and available options. And in the end it did the job. I’m not sure of the history, but I’m fairly certain that its feat of reaching Polarstern in the dead of winter is unprecedented.

We spent a week in a pleasant fjord just outside of Tromsø waiting for a weather break to cross the Barents Sea to the pack ice. The Barents Sea is notoriously stormy, and we needed wave heights below 4 m to attempt the crossing. Ice breakers don’t ride well in heavy seas, and there were refrigerated shipping containers carrying (our) food for Polarstern stored on deck in the bow. We couldn’t take big waves on the bow, nor could we tolerate much ice formation on the chilling units. Both happened anyway. But at least the crossing was relatively short, and within 72 hours we were in the pack ice.

The Dranitsyn ended up being a bigger part of Leg 3 than any of us imagined at the time. Had our departure from Polarstern gone as expected, we would have been in transit on Dranitsyn as long as we were doing science on Polarstern. It was an interesting experience. Scientists are pretty good at keeping themselves busy; most of us have a long backlog of analyses to complete and papers to write, in addition to fielding emails from students and colleagues, and handling administrative matters. Absent the internet or email, however, a lot of these responsibilities disappeared. I worked on a proposal and finished a (3 year overdue) paper. Much of the rest of the 5 weeks we were on Dranitsyn I spent in discussion with my Leg 3 colleagues. It was something like an extended MOSAiC workshop. We covered everything from synthesizing across different science themes, to how time and on-ice resources would be shared between groups in a typical week.

The roughly 2 week delay in reaching the Polarstern was due in large part to ice conditions. Despite previously expeditions onboard icebreakers I hadn’t really thought out it this way before, but the ice compresses and relaxes in response to tides, winds, and other external forces. When the ice is compressed it’s incredibly difficult for an ice breaker to break; there’s simply no place for the ice to be displaced to. Under a relaxed state more leads are open, and there’s more space within the pack ice accommodate the displaced ice as the ship moves through. Temperature also plays a role. Icebreakers are more typically used during the spring summer and fall, when maritime shipping in the Arctic is active and more research activities are taking place. Spring, summer, and fall sea ice is naturally much warmer than winter sea ice. Warmer sea ice is softer and breaks more easily, and the surface of the ice has less friction. This means an icebreaker can more easily ride up and over the ice to break it. With temperatures low and the ice in a “compressed” state it was a tough grind, as this video from our embedded videographers from the UFA production company shows:

Despite the conditions and some weeks of uncertainty we did eventually make it to Polarstern. Seeing that little point of light appear on the horizon after all those weeks of travel made me appreciate how alone we were up there at that time of year.

After we reached Polarstern it took nearly a week to transfer cargo, exchange the scientists and crew, and become familiar enough with our tasks and the surroundings to take over. Many of the MOSAiC observations take place in what’s called the central observatory. This is an aggregation of relatively stable floes around Polarstern that house a number of on-ice installations. These include the colloquially named Met City, Balloon Town, Ocean City, and Droneville sites, among others. Beyond the central observatory are various “pristine” sites for snow and ice sampling, and beyond those lie the nodes of the less frequently visited distributed observatory. The distributed observatory is critical because it provides some spatial context to the intensive observations of the central observatory.

We had about a week of “normal” operations before the central Arctic started throwing plot twists at us. The ice was surprisingly dynamic. The reasons behind this will, I think, be an important science outcome of MOSAiC. Thinner, rougher sea ice? More wind stress? Whatever the cause the ice cracked a lot. By chance we were located in what ice dynamicists call a “shear zone”, an area of enhanced kinetic energy within the pack. Here’s the first emergence of a crack, on March 11. You can see the logistics team scrambling to move the snow machines to a safer location. Over the next few weeks this crack grew into a major and ever-evolving lead.

By April everyone was pretty used to cracks, leads, and ridges in the central observatory. Overall I was impressed with the resilience of the various team as different installations were threatened, and in some cases destroyed. For the ATMOS (atmospheric sciences) team in particularly, Leg 3 should have been relatively easy – low temps not withstanding. Everyone expected consolidated ice and stable, well-established instruments and protocols. Instead, for a period of time there was a near-daily scramble to maintain power and infrastructure at the Met City site. The adjacent Remote Sensing site was enveloped by a large ridge system and had to be relocated to near the logistics area. Setting up these sites is something that took specialists on Leg 1 many days, on Leg 3 systems had to be dismantled and re-established on the fly. Because spring is a particularly interesting time for atmospheric chemistry in the Arctic the clock was ticking every time a site or instrument went down. The dedication and ingenuity of the scientists at the Met City and the Remote Sensing sites was great to observe. The rest of us helped where we could, but we had our hands pretty full with other problems.

At the top of the problems list was the loss of the hole for the main CTD/rosette system. The CTD is an instrument package that measure conductivity, temperature, and pressure (depth) along with other parameters. It is the fundamental tool in ship-based oceanography. The CTD is attached to a long conductive wire, and embedded within a rosette of sample bottles. The sample bottles are fired at specific depths to collect water for a number of analyses and experiments. Lots of parameters and projects were dependent on this sampling system, and a huge amount of effort had been expended to construct and maintain a hole in the ice for deploying it. On March 15, however, the ice shifted, pushing Polarstern forward. This caused superficial damage to the Weatherhaven covering the hole, but more significantly placed the hole out of reach of the crane that operates the CTD/rosette. Just like that we lost all of our capacity to sample below 1000 m (the central Arctic Ocean is deeper than 4000 m in most places) and to collect large volumes of water from any depth. All sampling had to shift to a much smaller system at the Ocean City site.

Why couldn’t we simply make a new hole? It’s worth remembering that the ice in March is near its maximum thickness. It was roughly 160 cm thick when access to the main CTD hole was lost. This discounts any rafting of multiple ice floes, which was probable, and could easily double or triple the thickness. Assuming only a single layer of ice, the way to make a hole big enough for the CTD is with a chainsaw. The thickness of the ice that you can cut is limited by the size of the chainsaw bar. Maybe commercial logging operations have a 2 m bar, we certainly did not! You can cut the ice out in layers – I’ve had to do this in the Antarctic before – but the problem is that you create a bathtub as soon as you start cutting the final layer. To finish the job you’d need a snorkel for yourself and the chainsaw!

All our water column sampling had to shift to Ocean City, and focus on the upper 1000 m of the water column. Ocean City is the main site for the physical oceanography team. It was designed to accommodate a small team taking ultra-high resolution measurements of the surface ocean. The physical oceanographers went above and beyond sharing their space and resources, and I ended up thoroughly enjoying the time that I spent out at Ocean City. The below video was made on April 20 by lowering a GoPro through the CTD hole at Ocean City while one of the physical oceanographers is conducting high resolution profiling of temperature and salinity. You can see the microstructure profiler used for this near the end of the sequence.

In addition to the water column sampling we carried out sea ice sampling, when conditions allowed. To minimize the impact of light pollution from the vessel on the growth of sea ice algae our preferred ice coring sites were located some distance from the ship. Through the spring and summer, most of the photosynthesis taking place in the central Arctic occurs in the ice itself, rather than the water column. The ice algae have more consistent access to light than their planktonic counterparts, and are famously sensitive to even the lowest levels of light. Ambient light from the ship is more than enough to induce growth in the vicinity during the long polar night. Distance from the ship combined with the dynamic ice conditions created some access challenges.

Despite the access challenges we got some great ice core samples. We fielded two ice coring teams, one for first year ice and one for second year ice. I had the pleasure of working with the second year ice coring team. It was a great US-German-Russian collaborative effort, and we had some good times out there!

The original plan for exchanging Leg 3 with Leg 4 involved flying us all out on ski equipped Antonov An-74 aircraft. This would have been a slick and expedient way to carry out the exchange. It also requires a pretty long runway and permissive global travel. By mid-March it was clear that both of these things were going to be an issue. I’ll be honest, there were some tense weeks where it wasn’t clear when and how Leg 3 would end, and what the future of MOSAiC would be. Kudos to cruise and expedition leadership for navigating us through the ups and downs. In particular AWI logistics had the difficult task of designing and scoping the possible solutions. They did an amazing job of iteratively working through a huge range of options to come up with the one that maximized science and minimized impacts on individual lives. But of course it was a compromise.

The current plan involves the Polarstern leaving the central observatory in mid-May for a rendezvous with one or more ships near Svalbard. The Leg 4 personnel (including Bowman Lab member Emelia Chamberlain) are already under strict quarantine in Bremerhaven, Germany. They’ll remain under quarantine until they depart for Svalbard at roughly the same time Polarstern leaves the central observatory. Once the crew has been exchanged, Leg 3 will sail for Germany and Leg 4 will begin the difficult task of re-establishing observations at the central observatory. An advantage of this plan is that it doesn’t require a complete breakdown of the central observatory. It will require, however, that many of the installations be partially disassembled for safety while Polarstern is away from the floe.

There was one opportunity to leave Polarstern before the official Leg 3-4 exchange. After agonizing over it for a couple of days I decided I needed to take advantage of the opportunity. After an epic few weeks our project was in decent shape, and with two young kids and no school or daycare, attention needed to shift to the home front. On April 22 I stepped onto a Twin Otter operated by Kenn Borek Air Ltd. to begin the long flight home with six other expedition members. We flew to Station Nord in Greenland, then across the Canadian Arctic via Eureka-Resolute-Arctic Bay-Churchill-Toronto, and finally to the US.

Immigration: “You’re coming from where?”

Me: “Resolute”

Immigration: “What were you doing in Resolute”

Me: “Just passing through, we were only there for a few minutes”

Immigration: “So where were you before that?”

Me: “Greenland, but again not very long. See there’s this ship…”

Immigration: “Uh, nevermind. Here’s your passport.”

The basic idea behind MOSAiC is to drive Polarstern into the Laptev Sea and tether the ship to an (increasingly rare) large floe of multiyear sea ice. As we move toward winter, the floe and Polarstern will become encased in newly forming sea ice. The ship will drift with this ice through the full cycle of seasons, allowing a rare opportunity to study the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of sea ice through its full progression of growth and decay.

But MOSAiC is about more than sea ice. Sea ice is – for now – a dominant ecological feature of the central Arctic, and it exerts a strong influence on both the atmosphere and the upper ocean. Better predicting the consequences of reduced sea ice cover on these environments is a major goal of the expedition.

With support from the National Science Foundation, for our own little piece of MOSAiC PhD student Emelia Chamberlain and I are collaborating with Brice Loose and postdoctoral researcher Alessandra D’Angelo at the University of Rhode Island, along with colleagues from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. We’ll be looking at how the structure of prokaryotic and eukaryotic communities in sea ice and the upper ocean influence the oxidation of methane (a potent greenhouse gas), and the production and uptake of CO₂. I’m looking forward to joining Polarstern in late January for a long, cold stint at the end of the polar night!

Hello! My name is Emelia Chamberlain and I am a first year PhD student here in the Bowman Lab working on the MOSAiC project. I just got back from a very exciting week in Utqiagvik Alaska for MOSAiC snow and ice training. But first, an overview… As mentioned in an earlier post, the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) project is an international effort to study the Arctic ocean-ice-atmosphere system with the goal of clarifying key climatic and ecological processes as they function in a changing Arctic. Within the larger scope of this project, our lab and collaborators from the University of Rhode Island (URI) will be studying how microbial community structure and ecophysiology control fluxes of oxygen and methane in the central Arctic Ocean.

MOSAiC begins in Sept of 2019, when the German icebreaker RV Polarstern will sail into the Laptev Sea and be tethered to an ice flow. Once trapped in the ice, both ship & scientists will spend the next year drifting through the Arctic. The goal is to set up a central observatory and collect time-series observations across the complete seasonal cycle. This year-long time series will be both exciting and critical for the future of Arctic research, but it is logistically difficult to carry out. The cruise is split up into 6 “legs”, with scientists taking two month shifts collecting observations and living the Arctic life. Resupply will be carried out by other icebreakers and aircraft. I myself will be taking part in the last two legs of this project from June – October 2020, with Jeff, Co-PI Brice Loose (URI), and his post-doc Alessandra D’Angelo (URI) representing our project on the rest of the voyage.

Laboratory training in Bremerhaven, Germany

As one would imagine, with over 600 scientists involved and continuous measurements broken up between multiple teams, this project requires a LOT of advanced planning. However, this is the fun part, as it means we get to travel a lot in preparation! In March, Jeff and I traveled to Potsdam, Germany to participate in a MOSAiC implementation workshop. Shortly after, we took a train up to the Alfred Wegener Institute facilities in Bremerhaven with Brice, Alessandra, and other MOSAiC participants to train on some of the instrumentation we will be operating on the Polarstern. We spent a full week training on instruments like a gas chromatograph, gas-flux measurement chambers, and a membrane inlet mass spectrometer (MIMS). While many of us had operated these types of instruments before, each machine is different and several were engineered or re-designed by participating scientists specifically for MOSAiC.

The bulk of the training was focused on the MIMS, which will be used to take continuous underway ∆O₂/Ar measurements from surface waters during MOSAiC. Water is piped from below the Polarstern and run through the mass spectrometer where dissolved gas concentrations are measured. Argon (Ar), a biologically inert gas, is incorporated into the ocean’s mixed layer at the same rate as oxygen (O2). However, while argon concentrations are evenly distributed, oxygen concentrations are affected by biogeochemical processes (photosynthesis and respiration by biota). We can therefore compare oxygen and argon measurements in the water column to determine how much oxygen has deviated from what we would expect through physical air-sea exchange processes (i.e. deviations from biologic activity). From these oxygen fluxes, we can estimate Net Community Production (NCP), which is defined as the total amount of chemical energy produced by photosynthesis minus that which is used in respiration. This is an important balance to quantify, as it is representative of the amount of carbon removed biologically from the atmosphere (CO2) and sequestered into the ocean pool. The goal is to use these continuous MOSAiC measurements to quantify these biogeochemical budgets through time and get a better understanding of whether the Arctic is net phototrophic or heterotrophic – whether photosynthesis or respiration is the dominant process.  

Field training in Utqiagvik, Alaska

After a productive week in Bremerhaven, this past week we stepped outside the laboratory with a snow and ice field training session in Utqiagvik, Alaska. One of the challenges of Arctic fieldwork is, of course, that it takes place in the frigid Arctic environment. To help scientists prepare for life on the ice and to help standardize/optimize sampling methods for MOSAiC, there were 3 snow and ice field training sessions organized (the two others took place earlier this year in Finland.) This trip was particularly exciting for me, as it was my first time in the Arctic! Not only did I learn a lot about sampling sea ice but I was struck by the dynamic beauty of the polar landscape. No wonder researchers continue to be fascinated with the unanswered questions of this wild ecosystem.

The three trainings that everyone had to complete consisted of snow sampling, ice sampling and snow mobile training. Aside from that, people were able to learn or compare more advanced methods for their sampling specialities and test out gear, both scientific and personal weather protection. I was lucky in that the average -18ºC weather we experienced in Utqiagvik will most likely be representative of the type of weather I will be facing in the summer months of MOSAiC. The winter teams will have to contend with quite a bit cooler conditions.

While in Utqiagvik, we here at the Bowman Lab decided to make the most of this trip by also collecting some of our own sea-ice cores to sample and experiment with. The goal of our experiment is to determine the best method for melting these cores (necessary for sampling them) while providing the least amount of stress to the resident microbial communities that we are interested in sampling for. I will write up a post covering the methods and ideas behind this experiment soon – but in the meantime, please enjoy this excellent go-pro footage from beneath the ice captured by Jeff during our fieldwork. The brown gunk coating the bottom of the ice is sea-ice algae, mostly made up of diatoms. The ice here is only 68 cm thick allowing for a lot of light penetration and an abundant photosynthetic community. At the end, you can also note the elusive Scientists in their natural sampling habitat.

What’s next?

As Sept 2019 gets closer, preparations are likely to ramp up even more. Even though I won’t be in the field for another year, it is exciting to think that the start of MOSAiC is rapidly approaching and after these two weeks of training I am feeling much more prepared for the scientific logistics and field challenges that will accompany this research. However, there is still much more to come. In a few weeks I will be jetting off again, but this time to URI to meet up with our collaborators for more instrument training. And thus the preparations continue…

The predicted drift track of Polarstern during MOSAiC, taken from the MOSAiC website.

This has been a (rare) good week for funding decisions.  A loooooong time ago when I was a third year PhD student I wrote a blog post that mentioned the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) initiative.  The Arctic has changed a lot over the last couple of decades, as evidenced by the shift from perennial (year long) to seasonal sea ice cover.  This is a problem for climate modelers whose parameterizations and assumptions are based on observational records largely developed in the “old” Arctic.  MOSAiC was conceived as a coupled ocean-ice-atmosphere study to understand key climatic and ecological processes as they function in the “new” Arctic.  The basic idea is to drive the German icebreaker Polarstern into the Laptev Sea in the Fall of 2019, tether it to an ice flow, and allow it to follow the circumpolar drift (Fram style) for a complete year.  This will provide for continuous time-series observations across the complete seasonal cycle, and an opportunity to carry out a number of key experiments.

I first attended a MOSAiC workshop in 2012 (when I wrote that first blog post).  It only took six years and two tries, but we’ve officially received NSF support to join the MOSAiC expedition.  Co-PI Brice Loose at URI and I will be carrying out a series of experiments to better understand how microbial community structure and ecophysiology control fluxes of O₂ (as a proxy for carbon) and methane in the central Arctic Ocean.  The central Arctic Ocean is a weird place and we know very little about how these processes play out there. Like the subtropical gyres it’s extremely low in nutrients, but the low temperatures, extreme seasonality, (seasonal) sea ice cover, and continental shelf influences make it very different from the lower-latitude oceans.

The German icebreaker Polarstern, which will host the MOSAiC field effort.

The second meeting, involving many of the same participants, focused on the concept for a new interdisciplinary research cruise in the Arctic that may take place in the coming years.  The cruise is titled the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate, or MOSAiC.  There’s a little information on it here.  I tend to get very excited at these workshops, and in this case was motivated to write up a short summary on the state of Arctic sea ice microbiology (from my biased and incomplete perspective).  I found it to be a useful exercise that forced me to take a step back from the every day details of research (like fighting with R, see previous post).  Many thanks to the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) for the travel funds to attend both meetings!

For those interested the summary can be found here