eps analysis while the expedition across the arctic ocean continues kristin haas is now back on land together with untold terabytes of data now waiting to be deciphered but his team do have at least preliminary insights into the big question of how the ice in the arctic is changing but. 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 it 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 is being shrinking as seen by satellite suspiciously well during the summer over the last 4 decades that surfaces almost tom often 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 an arctic. ocean . what surprised us is how thick the ice became. by the end of