Speaker: Markus Rex, Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research
The Arctic is the epicenter of climate change, warming twice as quickly as the rest of the planet and driving increasing weather extremes across the northern hemisphere. But because the region is so remote, scientists have had a limited understanding of its processes. In 2019, the MOSAiC expedition set off on an unprecedented journey across the Arctic to take our knowledge about climate change to a new level.
Aboard the icebreaker Polarstern, researchers would spend a full year locked in the ice, collecting crucial data during polar winter for the first time ever.
In this lecture, MOSAiC expedition leader and atmospheric scientist, Markus Rex, will discuss his forthcoming book about the expedition, The Greatest Polar Expedition of All Time. The MOSAiC expedition was a massive undertaking that involved twenty countries and hundreds of researchers, and plenty of logistical challenges — including curious polar bears, sudden ice cracks, months of darkness in the polar night, and a pandemic.
Rex will share highlights from the expedition and explore the urgency of MOSAiC’s research, describing an Arctic that is vastly altered by warming but that still has a chance to be saved.
Markus Rex is the head of atmospheric research at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, and a professor of atmospheric physics at the University of Potsdam. He has taken part in numerous expeditions to the Arctic, Antarctica, and other remote regions of the world to research the complex processes that can lead to dramatic changes in the climate. He heads the MOSAiC project, a unique research collaboration by ninety institutions from twenty countries.