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 — six scientists and six personnel — will arrive in Kirkenes, Norway on 14 August, await icebreaker passage, then drift frozen in Arctic pack ice for eight months toward Greenland aboard the 26-metre, 16-metre-wide French-built vessel operated by the Tara Ocean Foundation.
- Romain Troublé, executive director of the Tara Ocean Foundation, raised €26m (£22m) to fund the mission and was awarded the Shackleton medal this week; the station's design came from his aunt Agnès Troublé (fashion designer agnès b.) and co-founder Étienne Bourgois.
- Dr Nina Schuback of the Swiss Polar Institute will sample microbes in seawater through the station's "moon pool," a central opening that also serves as the launch point for divers, underwater drones, and remotely operated vessels descending into the icy depths.
- The voyage is only the third transpolar drift ever attempted, following Fridtjof Nansen's on the Fram in 1893-96 and a 2006 Tara schooner trip, and forms the first leg of a planned 20-year, 10-leg continuous expedition aimed at driving policy changes to protect the Arctic.
- The Arctic is warming three to four times faster than the global average, with melting sea ice exposing the region to threats from shipping, fishing, mining, and pollution, according to the source.
- The crew face months of complete darkness, temperatures as low as -50C (-58F), and rescue times that could take a week — a selection process Schuback likened to the evaluation for the International Space Station, saying she feels both "excited and scared."
Why it matters: The Arctic Ocean is warming three to four times faster than the rest of the planet, and scientists warn they are "losing species before we have time to discover them." This €26m expedition — only the third transpolar drift ever attempted — generates the baseline biological data needed to inform protection policies before the central Arctic's fragile ecosystem is irreversibly altered by shipping, mining, and pollution.
