On our way to the North Pole in the rain!

For the past week we have been travelling north among melting ice floes, with our sights set on the North Pole. The weather has varied from wonderful sunny days to grey skies with heavy fog. In recent days we’ve had rain — an unusual weather phenomenon up here, but it has given the researchers the opportunity to collect unique rain samples.

We are travelling together with the Canadian icebreaker CCGC Louis S. St-Laurent, and it is an awe-inspiring sight when the fog lifts and she appears in all her majesty astern of us.

Most of the ice we see around us is melting first-year ice, formed during the past winter. But there are also floes of multi-year ice up here. They stand out by having thicker ridges, built up from ice floes that have piled on top of each other. Multi-year ice is often somewhat darker in tone, since one can see traces of algae and sediments that have been present on the underside of the floes as they have stacked together.

Katarina Gårdfeldt, Expedition Coordinator