The last ice expedition

[phantom power]

Yesterday I received an e-mail from climate journalist, film maker and polar explorer Bernice Notenboom, the first Dutch woman to have reached the South Pole:

I am a polar explorer and in the spring of 2013 we plan to ski from the North Pole to Ward Hunt Island on Ellesmere.
We would love to be part of a scientific project, but for funding purposes it needs to be groundbreaking and innovative.

Given that we already have such good satellite data (IceSat, Cryosat, etc.) it will be hard to press the scientists to collaborate. My opinion is that we don't have enough observations in the field during the winter/spring when the Arctic ice is there. One area of interest to me is the multi-year ice that is banked against the coast of Greenland and Canada. We will enter this area around 84° of latitude and I was wondering if you had any ideas what we could do there as we cross it to Ward Hunt Island. What do you think would be relevant to scientists and hasn't been done in the field? Mind you, we are doing this trip pretty much unsupported, so we can't lug heavy instruments or equipment with us.

A scientist at NASA suggested we should look at the aerosols concentration above the Arctic skies -- with a small instrument that records it. We could potentially establish a relationship between the Arctic melt and aerosols concentrations.

The title was taken from an image that Bernice attached to her mail

http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2012/12/the-last-ice-expedition.html