Nicolas Cassar, assistant professor of earth and ocean sciences, teaches courses in the Nicholas School of the Environment. From August to October of this year, Cassar’s research on carbon in the Arctic water, ice and air took him to the upper reaches of the Earth, including the North Pole, on the scientific icebreaker the R/V PolarStern.
Cassar was invited on the three-month scientific expedition, which was led by the Alfred Wegener Institute of Germany. The PolarStern left Norway in early August and reached the North Pole on approximately August 22.
“It’s such an amazing place,” Cassar said. “Unless you looked at your GPS, you wouldn’ t know that you were at the North Pole. The ice at the surface is very different even a day later.”
Although tagged polar bears have been tracked as far north as the North Pole, Cassar and his fellow Arctic researchers saw no signs of life that far north.
“As we got further into the ice, there were no birds,” Cassar said. “Above the ice, it was just pure white.”
Unlike the South Pole, there is no stationary North Pole with land that a person can stand on—instead, the North Pole consists entirely of constantly shifting ice and water.
Cassar, who is French, was one of a select few scientists from American universities to be invited aboard the ship—out of around 55 scientists. Most of the PolarStern scientists were Europeans affiliated with the Wegener Institute, from Germany, Russia or Sweden. The scientists on board spanned the sciences, from biologists, geologists and chemists to physical oceanographers and ice physicists.
“The sea ice is retreating, and we’re trying to understand how that impacts the carbon exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere,” Cassar said. “We are studying how carbon fluxes are responding to the drastic change in the environment.”
The Duke researcher analyzes the effect of increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere on global climate change by studying the movement of carbon in the environment, from the ocean to the atmosphere (and eventually to plant and animal life).
The website for the the R/V Polarstern calls the ship a “large-scale floating laboratory” and “the most important tool in Germany’s polar research program.” The most recent trip was the ship’s third voyage to the North Pole.
Each of the ship’s scientists worked on their individual research in laboratories on the icebreaker.
From the PolarStern, Cassar would take a helicopter to five remote ice floes to drill into the Arctic ice with a corer. He took the samples back to his floating lab and analyzed their contents—the biogenic gases within the ice, as well as the plankton in and under the ice.
While Cassar was taking the samples, the helicopter would stay running in case the ice shifted or a polar bear happened upon the research.
Cassar also continuously pumped water from beneath the ship into the lab to analyze ocean gases as the ship was sailing.
“You work from the time you wake up in the morning to very late at night,” Cassar said. “It costs something like $60,000 a day to be on the water, so you want to maximize the number of working hours.”
With no commute or real-world distractions such as email to deal with, life on the polar icebreaker for Cassar consisted of science all the time, which was made easier due to the round-the-clock daylight.
“There was some darkness toward the end of the cruise,” Cassar said. “We saw some beautiful northern lights.”
Cassar has been at Duke for the past two years after getting his doctorate at the University of Hawaii and conducting his postdoc research at Princeton.
“It’s great that my work takes me to these very pristine environments, like Hawaii and the Arctic,” Cassar noted.
The research team in Cassar’s laboratory at Duke focuses on the Arctic during the summer and the Southern Ocean that surrounds Antarctica during the austral summer.
A research analyst from Cassar’s lab, Bruce Barnett, is heading to Antarctica this January to continue the field research.
And yes, he’s taking the same Duke flag with him to Antarctica.
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