UAF scientist leads Beaufort expedition

The University of Alaska Fairbanks has announced that UAF researcher Jennifer Hutchings is leading a team of scientists that is studying the relationship between sea ice movement, stresses in the ice and the overall mass of the ice. The research team is spending the first two weeks of April at the U.S. Navy ice camp in the Beaufort Sea to deploy buoys and instruments for the measurement of sea ice stresses and movements.

Weather systems in the Arctic cause the sea ice to move constantly, to form open water leads, pressure ridges and other sea ice features. Those features may affect the thickness and durability of ice, in response to the impact of climate change. Hutchings hopes that a better understanding of the complex process of ice movement and deformation will improve climate models, shed light on how sea ice has behaved in the past and provide insights into how the ice may change in the future, UAF says.

The UAF-led Beaufort Sea expedition forms part of the Cold Regions Research and Experiment: Dynamic Nature of the Arctic project, a UAF contribution to International Polar Year. The team includes scientists from the University of Delaware and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory.