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University-AK Fairbanks Center issued the following announcement on March 12.
On the cusp of Interior Alaska’s springtime, Melinda Webster will not experience it this year. She’ll miss most of summer, too. Webster will soon head north of Earth’s land masses, to spend the next half year cradled in ice.
Webster, a sea-ice specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, will in a few days board flights that will carry her across the globe to Svalbard. From there, she will carry her bag upon a 35-passenger aircraft. She will then fly more than 500 miles northward before landing on an ice runway and riding a snowmachine to the research vessel Polarstern, an icebreaker that has been twirling in the sea ice of the Arctic Ocean since last October.
Webster came to Interior Alaska in November 2019 to take a job with the Geophysical Institute from her previous job at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. That move got her a lot closer to her specialty: sea ice, which forms on top of the ocean in very cold places. Soon, the ephemeral substance that is so influential in global weather will surround her.
Because of this, Webster will miss the 80-degree air of middle-Alaska summer after enduring a cold winter. But she doesn’t mind.
“This is really a once-in-a-generation experience,” she said.
Webster will be one of 600 researchers from 20 countries who will over the months shuttle northward to live on the Polarstern, an icebreaker owned by the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany.
Original source can be found here.
Source: University-AK Fairbanks Center
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