There is a particular serenity that settles over you when you are standing on the bridge on Oden and watching the ice come apart in front of the bow, the gaze following the ice chunks plop from under the hull. It is not silence. There is absolutely nothing silent about several thousand tonnes of steel breaking through multiyear sea ice. But what stands out most is the serene composure of the Captain and the 2nd Officer despite the complexity outside - that took me completely by surprise. Everyone here has a job that matters, and both respect and steadiness are in every step of carrying through the day.

I came into this Polar Connect 2026 expedition expecting to learn about desirable seabed conditions for a submarine cable route in the Arctic and navigating in sea-ice-covered waters while laying a cable. I did not expect to be mesmerised by the beautiful choreography of running daily operations on Oden.

The part of this trip I am enjoying so much is watching the people work together. The bridge officers, the SU mapping team, the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat team supporting science instruments, the engineers who keep Oden herself running, so that everyone else's instruments can perform too.

Spending the morning watching the multibeam team work together with the officer in command of Oden, what left me in awe wasn't the accuracy of seabed data rendered on the screen, it was the calm conversation running between the teams – direction, speed, swath width, a request to hold position for some minutes – followed by a simple acknowledgment from the bridge. The officer steering the ship and the person watching the seafloor unfold on the monitor are, in that moment, doing one job between two teams, and neither of them seems to find that remarkable. It is just how the expedition works towards the same goal. That kind of trust, while creating a picture of a seabed that is so poorly mapped, one swath at a time, entirely dependent on someone else holding direction while ice moves around and underneath the hull – is simply impressive to observe from the sidelines.

A lot can be said about another great team. That's the team from the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat - the crew who run the winch and the deck operation for any instruments that need to be lowered overboard at the foredeck of Oden, or when a lab needs to be set up for scientists during the expedition. Whenever a CTD cast needs to be done, the instrument itself is the easy part, but someone has to get it safely into the water, lower it steadily to the right depths for the right number of minutes, and bring it back up without losing it, while also monitoring all the way while the CTD data is being recorded. The Swedish Polar Research Secretariat team are not running the science, but the science doesn't happen without them on Oden.

And behind all of them almost unseen: the engineers keeping Oden's power exactly where the ice conditions demand it to be, the cook preparing wonderful meals for people who have completely lost track of time as the light never ceases to seep through the windows. However, all of them have a small role in why the quality of seabed surveying data is so good.

I was not prepared for how different ice turns out to be in reality from the one I’ve seen in my life. Some mornings it is scattered floes on dark, glassy water like little islands of white. Other days it looks almost completely continuous white in every direction, and Oden continues a persistent rhythm that you feel thrumming all over the ship. There have been days of genuinely mesmerizing calm – pure bright daylight, no wind, turquoise patches of melt ponds on white ice floes – a true mirage. And there have been moments when floes were thick enough to stop us for a moment before we backed up and pushed on again.

What ties all of these reflections together is that same calmness that starts on the bridge. The Arctic demands no urgency. It simply asks for respect, and everyone onboard has learned to plan around that. Schedules bend, route plans adapt, people align. Nobody seems bothered by any of it, because the success of the expedition lies in having the right skills to adjust plans when circumstances change.

Describing my experience on this expedition to anyone who is curious about it will be complex. Not because it is impossible, but because so much of what has stayed with me cannot be put into a simple statement. It is an accumulation of small, competent, unhurried daily acts: a path found navigating through ice floes, a swath on the map finished, a conversation between an engineer and a geophysicist that starts as small talk and ends in deep discussion. It takes a certain kind of humility to sit in a room full of people who are each an expert in their field, and actually listen carefully. These experiences, as much as any technical result, are what this expedition is quietly teaching everyone here. Good outcomes come from trusting expertise, simply because complex things can only be achieved together. Those moments will stay with me longer than all the facts I have learned about the seabed conditions.

Ieva Muraškienė
Strategy officer Polar Connect