BERLIN: Organisers of a year-long international Arctic science expedition say they have found a way to keep going despite difficulties caused by the pandemic lockdown, but it will require a three-week break in the mission.

Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Ocean Research said on Friday that the expedition ship RV Polarstern will leave its position in the high Arctic next month and break through the surrounding sea ice to rendezvous with two German vessels bringing supplies and crew replacements.

The maneuver is necessary because travel restrictions imposed to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus make a planned resupply by air or sea from Norway or Russia impossible.

Expedition leader Markus Rex said that the lockdown could have scuttled the remainder of the mission.

For a long time it was on a knife edge and there was even a possibility that the expedition might have to be broken off, he said.

The 140-million-euro ($158 million) expedition set out last September with 100 scientists and crew from 17 nations including the United States, France, China and Britain. Its goal is to study the impact of global warming on the Arctic and improve scientific models used to forecast how the climate will change worldwide.

As temperatures in the Arctic plummeted and the ocean surface froze over last fall, scientists built a research camp on the ice with the Polarstern acting as their base.

Rex said expedition members will have to pause numerous scientific measurements during the three-week supply run, but that this was preferable to abandoning the mission entirely.

Published in Dawn, April 25th, 2020