Video: Dreamer who Conceived of the Largest Arctic Science Expedition in History Now Racing to Save it

Covid-19 and rapid Arctic warming are pushing hundreds of scientists’ research about critical climate questions onto increasingly thin ice.

Share This Article

Share This Article

When the largest Arctic expedition in history headed toward the North Pole last September, it was a dream come true for Matt Shupe. The atmospheric scientist had worked for more than a decade to freeze an icebreaker filled with scientists into the polar ice for a year.

Then, in March—six months into the expedition—the coronavirus triggered calamity. Shupe, who had returned from MOSAiC last winter and wasn’t due to return to the ship until this summer, was desperately trying to get back, hoping to keep the coronavirus and the rapidly melting Arctic from turning his dream expedition into a frozen nightmare. 

While Shupe was sequestered in his home in Colorado, the MOSAiC expedition seemed as distant as a moonshot as it struggled with both the blessing and the curse of its isolation in the ice. Stranded on the Polarstern icebreaker, more than a hundred people worried about family members back home, threatened by the pandemic, while they were facing the possibility of being marooned until June. In the meantime, the ice around them was falling apart months earlier than expected.

This week, Shupe and more than 100 other scientists, specialists and sailors shipped out from Germany to keep the expedition afloat. InsideClimate News Senior Editor Michael Kodas wrote this week about the MOSAiC expedition and interviewed Shupe while the atmospheric scientist was quarantined in Germany prior to his departure on the mission.

INSIDE InsideClimate News is an ongoing series of conversations with our newsroom’s journalists and editors. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into reporting and crafting our award-winning stories and projects. Watch more of them here.

About This Story

Perhaps you noticed: This story, like all the news we publish, is free to read. That’s because Inside Climate News is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. We do not charge a subscription fee, lock our news behind a paywall, or clutter our website with ads. We make our news on climate and the environment freely available to you and anyone who wants it.

That’s not all. We also share our news for free with scores of other media organizations around the country. Many of them can’t afford to do environmental journalism of their own. We’ve built bureaus from coast to coast to report local stories, collaborate with local newsrooms and co-publish articles so that this vital work is shared as widely as possible.

Two of us launched ICN in 2007. Six years later we earned a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and now we run the oldest and largest dedicated climate newsroom in the nation. We tell the story in all its complexity. We hold polluters accountable. We expose environmental injustice. We debunk misinformation. We scrutinize solutions and inspire action.

Donations from readers like you fund every aspect of what we do. If you don’t already, will you support our ongoing work, our reporting on the biggest crisis facing our planet, and help us reach even more readers in more places?

Please take a moment to make a tax-deductible donation. Every one of them makes a difference.

Thank you,

Share This Article