“The ice sentinels are the final heartbeats of the arctic ocean.”

Malcolm W. J. Davidson, European Space Agency, Head of Campaigns

 

The Sentinels expedition will employ the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 polar orbiting satellites to survey a highly inaccessible yet critically important corner of the Arctic Ocean. The Arctic is often perceived in public sentiment as remote, barren, and disconnected from the rest of the world. It is not. Global weather patterns, ocean currents, biodiversity, mid-latitude agriculture, finance and public health are all directly linked to the health of the Arctic sea ice ecosystem.

 

Arctic Sea Ice Drill Site

CO2 peepers being installed into sea ice

Measuring the sea ice

 

Our aim is to serve the science community in the best way we can: by bringing home invaluable data no one else can collect. We are guided by a driving principle to maximize the impact of our expertise as polar explorers. 

Our Science Advisory Board consists of leading climate and sea ice scientists from around the world including: Professor Christian Haas, Head of Sea Ice Physics at the Alfred Wegener Institute; Mary Louise Timmermans, Damon Wells Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Yale University; and Professor Ed Hawkins, Lead Author of the 2021 IPCC report. 

We are humbled to be working with leading climate researchers and partnering with organizations working at the highest level of climate solutions, satellite imaging, sea ice physics, and marine biology. 

The data we bring back will propel our collective understanding of Arctic sea ice and its outsized impact on the planet at large. We’re honored to have such a profound purpose underpinning the legacy of this expedition.


  • The European Space Agency’s Cryosat-2 and Sentinel-3 satellites are essential for tracking future loss of Arctic sea ice, but their measurements of ice thickness require ground-truthing in the field to be truly useful. A major challenge for these satellites is measuring sea ice thickness in areas of rough (multi-year) ice – which are also inaccessible to all the most sturdy ice breakers.  Last Ice Sentinels will traverse as much of the oldest multi-year sea ice in the Lincoln Sea as possible, taking ground measurements to verify the data from these satellites. This will generate an unprecedented, high-value dataset of ice thickness which vastly improves the current state of knowledge of Arctic Sea Ice change.


  • The sea ice cover of the Arctic Ocean is in fast transition from a state of thick multi-year ice to thin, seasonal cover. This will dramatically impact Arctic food webs upon which humans and other mammals depend. These food webs are sustained by algae that live at the interface between the bottom of the old multi-year sea ice and the ocean - the base of the food chain.  They survive over winter in ice cover, seeding the ocean the following spring and kick starting its productivity with the arrival of the light. Understanding algal activity in thick multi-year sea ice - the state from which the Arctic Ocean is evolving - is critical to future predictions of future Arctic food webs as sea ice thins. Ice Sentinels will survey the biological oceanography of the ice-covered Lincoln Sea, tracking a passage through space and time to younger and younger ice as the team move west. It will generate first-time data from an otherwise inaccessible region, which is fundamental to understanding how thinner, reduced sea ice will affect the bottom of the food chain, so we can predict how that might affect the lives of other organisms in the sea. 

 

Sponsorship