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In addition to recovering the mooring, 15 polar scientists and engineers installed a new mooring, deployed a fleet of sophisticated drifting buoys on the ice and conducted surveys of water conditions across hundreds of miles. The work is part of a $3.9 million project funded by the National Science Foundation to take the year-round pulse of the Arctic Ocean and learn how the world's northernmost sea helps regulate global climate.
Since the 1980s scientists have seen arctic waters warm and the ice pack thin. The magnitude and rapid speed at which these changes occurred surprised many scientists and heightened concern that more radical changes are possible. Computer modelers say the trends fit how the Arctic could respond to warming caused by the buildup of greenhouse gases. Still, the changes might simply be part of a natural cycle.
Scientists from six schools, agencies
The North
Pole Environmental Observatory program involves researchers
and engineers from the University of Washington, NOAA's
Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Army's
Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover,
N.H., the Japanese Marine Science and Technology Center in
Yokosuka City, Oregon State University and the Naval
Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.
Mooring
The
mooring is a 2.7-mile-long cable anchored to the seafloor and
strung with instruments that monitor ocean conditions and ice
for a full year.
It's the third such mooring to be put in place. Data from the moorings used each of the previous two years are giving scientists year-round information about layers of water that are among the key determinants of how thick – or thin – the ice is in the Arctic.
Drifting buoys
include two Web cams this year
Nine buoys were installed
and will ride at least a year with the ice as it circles the
pole and heads toward the Atlantic. Scientists receive data
via satellite. On some the instruments are strung below into
the ocean, on others there are monitors above the ice
tracking weather and sunlight, some have both, and one
measures heat as it moves between the ocean, ice and
atmosphere.
The ice pack has proved unhealthy for many a drifting buoy, happily sending data one day and then never being heard from again after being crushed by shifting ice or chewed by polar bears. Thus researchers with NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory have aimed two Web cams at a couple key buoys this year in order to try to determine what is happening if they should stop working. The Web cams also provide information about the snow cover and weather.
Visit the North Pole via the Web at http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/gallery_np.html.
Surveying to
gain insights into broad changes in the circulation of the
ocean.
As another part of the North Pole Environmental
Observatory program, scientists used a helicopter and plane
to hopscotch across the ice, stopping to lower instruments
into the ocean. Water from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans
make their way into the Arctic and both can affect ice
thickness. Scientists are interested in the meandering border
where these waters meet and begin mixing because Pacific
waters carry nutrients and relatively fresh water across the
Arctic Ocean into the North Atlantic Ocean.
New this year was particularly intense sampling of the ocean north of Canada's Ellesmere Island. It is emerging as such a good area to monitor changes in Pacific and Atlantic waters that one scientist nicknamed it the freshwater switchyard of the Arctic.
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For more information:
-- Sandra Hines,
public information officer, 206-543-2580, shines@u.washington.edu
--
More details about work plan this year: http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/Plans2003.html
--
Daily reports from this year's camps: http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/2003Reports.html
******
Images
for use by news media only:
http://www.washington.edu/newsroom/news/images/northpole/morisonCTD.jpg
University
of Washington oceanographer Jamie Morison, leader of the
North Pole Environmental Observatory program, lowers
instruments on a line to survey temperatures and salinity in
the Arctic Ocean. Photo credit: National Science
Foundation/Peter West
http://www.washington.edu/newsroom/news/images/northpole/fluxbuoy.jpg
Tim
Stanton of the Navel Postgraduate School of Monterey, Calif.,
works on one of the buoys deployed by U.S. scientists as part
of this North Pole Environmental Observatory project. Photo
credit: University of Washington/Dean Stewart
http://www.washington.edu/newsroom/news/images/northpole/mooring.jpg
University of Washington field engineer James Johnson
prepares to lower another instrument on the cable of this
year's mooring at the North Pole. Photo credit: University of
Washington/Mike Ohmart
http://www.washington.edu/newsroom/news/images/northpole/CTDcast.jpg
University
of Washington oceanographer Michael Steele takes advantage of
a lead, a large crack in the ice, to lower instruments into
the Arctic Ocean. Photo credit: University of
Washington/Roger Anderson
###
