A At the crack of dawn, the leaders of the expedition line up with binoculars on the bridge of the icebreaker Polarstern. The day is overcast and the light is flat. Our ship is floating in front of a patchwork of dark new ice and white snow that looks much like any other. It takes me a minute to realise that there is a much larger floe in the distance. “We have just parked this far away so as not to damage it,” says Stefan Hendricks of the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), an ice expert on the Mosaic expedition , the largest-ever scientific voyage to the Central Arctic. Just in front of the bow of the ship is a refrozen lead – a large fracture in the sea ice – covered in a thin layer of blackish-grey ice. Beyond the lead is the white expanse of the floe. ( […]