159 years ago today, a legend was born: Fridtjof Nansen, a man who was not afraid to risk his life to prove that sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is drifting. His legacy lives on today, for example through the work we do at the Nansen Center in the Sea Ice Modelling group, which is connected to the Nansen Legacy project. I, Guillaume Boutin, want to take you on a journey to the Arctic and tell you about how Fridtjof Nansen’s research still inspires our research today.

Stephen Outten and Ingjald Pilskog host the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research podcast and recently talked to Igor Ezau about heatwaves and their dangers. Don’t miss this episode!

The Nansen Center Director, Sebastian H. Mernild, co-authored a chapter on the Greenland Ice Sheet and Arctic Mountain Glaciers in the recently published book “Arctic Hydrology, Permafrost and Ecosystems”. 

In June, ten MSc students from the University of Bergen and the Western Norway University of Applied Science embarked on the coast guard vessel KV Svalbard to participate in the research school cruise near Svalbard, led by the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center. Their goal was to get hands-on experience during a scientific cruise in the Arctic.

Who were the participants?

Researchers from NERSC, NORCE, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway), and the University of Bergen recently published an article in which they evaluate how well ocean surface currents in Northern Norway’s coastal areas can be studied with satellites, compared to traditional methods.

At this moment, the Norwegian Coast Guard icebreaker KV Svalbard is on a scientific expedition on the central Arctic Ocean with eleven scientists from different Norwegian and European institutions. Demanding operations are carried out to recover deep-water moorings deployed last summer. The moorings carry instruments to observe the ocean temperatures, salinity, ‘ocean sound’, carbon dioxide, and currents below the Arctic sea ice for one year. All this to calculate the ocean temperature below the sea ice. 

A new paper published in “Remote Sensing” addresses sea ice type classification in a new and clever way: Combining machine learning and remote sensing. The first author of the paper is a former intern at NERSC who created the central algorithm within the three months he spent in Bergen, and thanks to it, classifying sea ice types might have become faster and easier!

Seeing the ice from above

Nansensenterets direktør Sebastian H. Mernild er ansatt som prorektor ved Syddansk Universitet (SDU) fra 1. oktober. Han har derfor sagt opp sin stilling som senterets direktør etter nær fire år i Bergen. 

Record breaking heat wave in Siberia amidst of COViD-19 pandemia may seriously exacerbate the death toll.

Figure 1:: Illustration of the excess deaths toll based on the figures from Financial Times recalculated per one million of people. Background photo: Omsk, May, 25, 2020.