Ongoing Science Summary

MOSAiC was a year-long drift experiments through the Arctic, including a lot of oceanographic measurements. Details on MOSAiC can be found on the project's website, and there is an overview publication describing the oceanographic equipment that we used (Rabe et al., 2022).

Here are some scientific highlights from the physical oceanography part of the expedition:

• Using a fancy new uprising turbulence probe, we estimate a drag coefficient of (4-6)x10^-3 for the MOSAiC floe - a typical value for Arctic floes. And turbulence in leads is stronger than under the ice (Fer et al., 2022)!
• A method comparison confirmed that the strongly salinity-stratified Arctic halocline indeed separates the surface layer from the deeper ocean. We were able to reliably quantify the vertical diffusivity in this layer, K_z=10^-6 (which is super low), and found corresponding vertical heat fluxes are pretty much zero (Schulz et al., 2023).