The beginning of 2015 has been very busy in our APECS International Directorate in Tromsø, Norway. We finalized our brand new APECS website together with our partner the Arctic Portal in Iceland and released it last week. Hopefully this will make it easier for all of our members and partners to find all the great resources APECS has to offer and take advantage of them.
The Arctic Frontiers 2015 Conference was in January in Tromsø, and APECS contributed with a number of events and activities. We held a very successful three-day Science for Schools Event together in partnership with Arctic Frontiers and the Science Centre of Northern Norway (Nordnorsk Vitensenteret). In addition, APECS organised a Science Communication and Media Training Workshop in cooperation with the High North Academy in Tromsø. Last but certainly not least, APECS helped organize the Arctic Frontiers Early Career Poster Awards, to recognise and reward the great science presented by the early career researchers attending Arctic Frontiers. Thank you for all the mentors, presenters, poster judges and members that helped during these events.
For the Norwegian highlight of this newsletter, I want to draw your attention to the Norwegian Young sea ICE cruise (N-ICE2015), led by our partner and sponsor the Norwegian Polar Institute. The RV Lance headed North from Tromsø to Svalbard in early January to start its 6-month cruise in the drift ice North of Svalbard. The primary objective of the project is "to understand the effects of the new thin, first year, sea ice regime in the Arctic on energy flux, ice dynamics and the ice associated ecosystem, the local and global climate. Secondary objectives: Understand how available ocean heat is mixed upwards towards the sea ice and to what extent it influences the sea ice energy budget. Understand the fate of solar radiation incident on the first-year sea ice in the region and how its fate is affected by properties of the atmosphere, snow, ice, and ocean. Quantification of the changing mass balance of Arctic sea ice and its snow cover. Model the dynamics of the drifting ice. Understand the ice associated ecosystem and model future changes. Effects on local and global weather systems."
You can read more about the project here http://www.npolar.no/n-ice2015 and follow their weekly blog or follow them on Instagram and Twitter with #NICE2015Arctic.
