12 scientists will drift across the Arctic, locked inside sea ice for 8 months to watch an ocean survive its darkest, coldest season

Imagine spending eight months aboard a ship frozen into Arctic pack ice, with no sunlight for the majority of it, and the nearest help potentially a week away. That is precisely what a crew of 12 scientists, engineers, sailors, and a physician has agreed to do, and they’re doing it entirely on purpose.

This July, the 26-meter research vessel and platform Tara Polar Station is set to leave France, pick up several scientists in northern Norway and head into Russian waters. By mid-September 2026, the ship is expected to be encased in pack ice in the central Arctic Ocean, where its crew of 12 will drift for eight months through the Arctic winter and into spring, according to the Tara Ocean Foundation.

For the first time, the Tara Polar Station will enable a continuous long-term study of the central Arctic Ocean through all seasons. According to a vision paper, ‘Tara Polar Station: Advancing Scientific Understanding of the Central Arctic Ocean over the Next Twenty Years,’ published in Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, the Tara Polar Station is designed to drift with the ice pack and withstand the harshest of polar conditions, with an operational autonomy of up to 500 days.


This is not a survival stunt. It is science, and the stakes could not be higher.

Why the Arctic Ocean urgently needs answers
For most of human history, the central Arctic Ocean has been frozen and inaccessible, its biology largely unknown. Now rapid warming is changing that quickly, and governments will soon have to make consequential decisions about it, including whether to open it to commercial fishing as the ice gives way.

According to the European Commission, the EU and nine countries, including the United States, Canada, China, Norway, and Russia, agreed in June 2021 to ban commercial fishing in the central Arctic Ocean for at least 16 years, giving scientists time to learn about the ecosystem before any exploitation begins. The window is closing fast, and scientists still have next to no idea about what lives under the ice. As polar ecologist Nina Schuback, who will be spending the winter on board the vessel, has pointed out, nobody even knows if fish breed in the central Arctic Ocean. That’s a staggering blind spot for an ocean that covers millions of square kilometers.

The expedition, called Tara Polaris I, is the first of 10 planned drifts over 20 years, with scientists from 30 institutions in 12 countries contributing experiments, the Tara Ocean Foundation said. Science magazine reports that the $29 million vessel was largely funded by the French government and the EU, and that the first trip has a budget of $7 million.

What the last big Arctic mission found and why it changed everything
In many ways, Tara Polaris I is a sequel to MOSAiC, the landmark Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate expedition in which the German icebreaker Polarstern drifted through the central Arctic from October 2019 to September 2020. According to Science magazine, one of the biggest surprises of MOSAiC was evidence of biological activity during the polar night, challenging assumptions that the central Arctic ecosystem largely shuts down in winter.

However, the study ‘Overview of the MOSAiC expedition: Ecosystem’ published in Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene suggests the ecosystem never completely shuts down in winter, but instead remains quietly active. Phytoplankton and sea-ice algae in the central Arctic have developed overwintering strategies that allow them to quickly resume photosynthesis as soon as even minimal light returns after the polar night. Tara Polaris I wants to go much deeper into that biology. This time it’s the centerpiece of the whole research agenda, unlike MOSAiC, which was mostly about atmospheric and sea-ice physics.

What the crew will actually be doing out there
The six scientists on the winter leg will study subjects ranging from fish reproduction and carbon cycling to microbes that live in sea ice and even affect cloud formation. They will also examine how organisms cope with an environment in which the sun disappears for months and then suddenly reappears, a field known as chronobiology. In the central Arctic, the sun doesn't rise above the horizon for the whole month of February, then by the end of March it's shining all day, and scientists still don't fully understand how most marine organisms respond to that dramatic switch.

Researchers publishing the study ‘Tara Polaris: Shedding light on microbial and climate feedback processes in the Arctic atmosphere’ in Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene report the central Arctic is already warming up to four times faster than the global average, what is called Arctic amplification, and several key atmospheric and biological processes fueling this change are still little studied, in part because long-term access to the central Arctic Ocean through winter has historically been so difficult to achieve.

China's Xue Long 2 icebreaker will be operating in the Gakkel Ridge area in September and will carve a path to help the Tara Polar Station find a suitable place to freeze into the ice. Once locked in, the vessel will float until next summer when the ice pack frees it in the Fram Strait between Svalbard and Greenland.

Life in the dark: the human side of the mission
The psychological challenge is as real as the scientific one. The crew has been subjected to mental health screening and resilience training similar to that provided to winter-over personnel at Concordia Station, the French-Italian research base on the Antarctic Plateau, one of science’s most psychologically demanding postings, reports Science magazine. Trainers warned the crew that minor irritations would grow in the dark and that long isolation would test even the steadiest relationships.

The biggest physical threat on board is fire, as the vessel is filled with smoke detectors, and the crew will be checking for suspicious smells every night. The polar bear is another serious concern. They hunt like cats and can sneak up on you without warning. And in a real emergency in the dead of Arctic winter, rescue could be more than a week away, a reality the crew has been trained for.

Documenting a changing world
According to the Arctic Institute, the series of successive planned drifts will continue until 2045, when the Arctic Ocean may be largely ice-free in summer, a change no previous generation has ever seen. The Tara Polar Station program aims at recording this change live, season after season, year after year.

For the 12 people about to spend the winter in the ice, the mission is both a scientific frontier and a chance to create a record of the Arctic Ocean before the ice disappears.