Voyage to the end of the world: floating lab to explore life in Arctic adrift in ice
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- Tara polar station crew of six scientists and six personnel will arrive in Kirkenes, Norway on 14 August before an icebreaker opens a route for an eight-month overwintering drift from near the North Pole to Greenland on a 26-metre-long, 16-metre-wide vessel designed to freeze into pack ice.
- Tara Ocean Foundation executive director Romain Troublé was awarded the Shackleton medal this week for developing the polar station, which cost €26m (£22m) and brings together scientists from 15 countries.
- Dr Nina Schuback of the Swiss Polar Institute will sample microbes through the station's moon pool — a central opening also used to launch divers and underwater drones — aiming to discover species adapted to a region where the sun does not rise for nearly half the year.
- The Arctic is warming three to four times faster than the rest of the planet, and Troublé warned: "We are losing species before we have time to discover them."
- The expedition is the first of 10 planned legs spanning 20 years aimed at driving policy to protect the Arctic, with rescue potentially taking a week for personnel cut off in extreme isolation.
- The 2006 transpolar drift by an earlier Tara schooner was only the second such expedition in the central Arctic since Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen's voyage on the Fram in 1893-96.
Why it matters: The Arctic is warming three to four times faster than the global average, and the central Arctic Ocean's ecosystems remain largely undocumented — meaning species may vanish before science even catalogs them. Troublé's €26m mission aims to fill that blank slate and supply data to drive policy protecting a region newly exposed to shipping, fishing and mining as sea ice retreats.
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