Shawn Vestal: WSU professor’s Arctic research dangerous, but exhilarating

It was a chilly way to spend the spring.

Von Walden, an engineering professor at Washington State University, worked for about a month on a ship in the Arctic in May and June of 2015. Every morning he’d get up, put on his “flotation suit” – a heavy snowsuit with a life preserver built in – and head down the gangplank.

“And then you’re on three or four feet of ice,” Walden said this week. “It’s just open ocean underneath you. … You’re on the ocean, walking around.”

Walden was participating in a research project of the Norwegian Polar Institute, which conducted months of research on the Arctic sea ice with an international team of 70 scientists. The effort, which has produced some 30 separate scientific papers, was the first wintertime mission of its kind to study “the new Arctic” – where sea ice is much thinner and weaker, seems more prone to storms and warming, and may be losing its ability to help “regulate” and stabilize the climate.

“Many things we experienced took us by surprise,” said Mats Granskog, chief scientist of the project, in a WSU news release. “We saw that the new Arctic, with much thinner sea ice only three to four feet thick, functions much differently from the Arctic we knew only 20 years ago, when the ice was much thicker.”

Twenty years ago, at the time of the last significant sea ice project, they might have expected to find ice that’s 10 feet thick. Researchers are concerned that the thinner ice and more frequent melting may warm up the earth even more, as solar energy that has been reflected back into space by a thick sheet of ice is instead absorbed more often by the ocean.

Members of the team reported on their findings this week at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The Norwegian team led the project; Walden joined them for about a month in May and June 2015, bringing along equipment to take cloud measurements.

“Nobody has ever been on the ice like this,” Walden said. “It’s the most exciting field work I’ve ever done. I’ve been all over the polar regions and being on the sea ice was mind-boggling. It was an incredible experience.”

A professor of civil and environmental engineering, Walden’s primary research emphasis has been the study of polar clouds. Among the factors he noted on this journey was the effect of the high, warm winds on the thinning ice.

“The wind really pushes you,” he said. “The wind puts stress on the sea ice and it pushes the sea ice, and now that the sea ice is thinner, it gets pushed around and mixed up.”

That mixing of warmer water from below – even if it’s relatively minor – contributes to the overall pattern of warming and more fragile ice buildup, limiting the growth of ice.

The ship operated by anchoring to ice floes, and then drifting along with them until they broke up. Walden said the ship attached to three floes over the course of its journey.

Sometimes, the changes in temperature came alarmingly fast. Walden said at the start of June, the ship was “docked” in a floe when the temperatures began warming. The next morning, “Everything was just starting to open up. There was open water all around us, just overnight,” he said.

The crew began rescuing equipment from the ice surface, and preparing to set off in search of another floe. The ice had turned slushy, and falling snow was weighing it down so sea water was coming over the top, creating treacherous “ponds.” The ice was melting in pockets, “like Swiss cheese,” Walden said.

“I’m walking around and all of a sudden – bam! – I go right in a hole,” Walden said. “I’m up to my waist.”

He made it out OK, but it reinforced the grim reality of the situation.

“It takes a lot to get these data,” he said. “It takes a lot, and it’s difficult work and it’s dangerous work.”

Shawn Vestal can be reached at (509) 459-5431 or shawnv@spokesman.com. Follow him on twitter at @vestal13.