christine haas is a sea ice geophysicist in the us could be in an institute in gemini he sees the arctic winter as the key factor. that the ice forms in the winter and indoors through the summer. it has a considerable influence on the summer and therefore on the entire climate system. but to really study the young during winter you need to be at one with the ice an international research team made that very commitment since last october the poor lash down research ship has been drifting across the arctic ocean trapped in the pack ice. it's the center of the largest arctic research expedition ever lasting one full year. when it's colder than minus 30 or even down to minus 60 with the wind chill factor it's very hard to work and also very dangerous you have to cover up your entire body. most christian hoss and his team use the winter months to investigate the sea ice on a quest for answers to the big question why is it shrinking. their work involved extracting ice cores measuring the temperature and movement of the ice and cutting samples into thin slices their mission as such is not one o

eps analysis while the expedition across the arctic ocean continues christine haas is now back on the lam and together with untold terabytes of data now waiting to be deciphered but he's team do have at least preliminary insights into the big question of how the ice in the arctic is changing. and it was very interesting to see that when we came onto the ice flow in october the ice was only 30 to 50 centimeters thick. and over the course of the winter over the following 5 or 6 months they grew to almost 2 meters in thickness that is it almost quadrupled that's a very important discovery. until now researches knew only that the surface of the ice has been shrinking as seen by satellite suspiciously well during the summer over the last 4 decades that surface is almost hol ft in size. satellites cannot measure however is the thickness of the ice. what we've now seen is that at the start of the season at the end of the summer the ice was much thinner than it had been 30 years ago the last time we measured ice in the syberia in arctic. what surprised us is how thick the ice became. by the e