Vishnu Nandan, a 32-year-old polar researcher who is a native of Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala, is the only Indian aboard the multidisciplinary drifting observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) expedition, the largest-ever Arctic expedition in history. Vishnu Nandan will be part of a four-month trip, to begin in November 2019, which will include 300 scientists. He will be aboard the Polarstern, a German research vessel, anchored on a large sheet of sea ice in the Central Arctic. He is to travel in a Russian icebreaker ship from the Norwegian port of Tromso to join the Polarstern on its second leg.
The expedition is to help researchers better understand climate change effects and aid in improved weather projections. Since the journey is during the Polar winter, they will likely not see sunlight until their return in March 2020.
According to a report in October 2019, MOSAiC, led by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany, will be the first to conduct a study of this scale at the North Pole for an entire year. Previous studies have been of shorter periods as the thicker sea ice sheets prevent access to the place in winter. So Polarstern was locked into a large sea ice sheet, before the winter began there, and it is to drift along with it.
Usually, expeditions are for shorter periods, and research stations are nearby for support. Vishnu Nandan’s four-month expedition would be in freezing cold temperatures with limited communication to the outside world.
The expedition hopes to parameterise the atmospheric, geophysical, oceanographic and all other possible variables in the Arctic, and use it to more accurately forecast the changes in our weather systems. Nandan’s role as a radar remote sensing specialist is to deploy radar sensors on the icy surface of the sea and accurately measure the ice thickness and its variations.
The Arctic had the second lowest sea ice extent in 2019 in the past 50 years. With lesser ice cover, more of the Arctic Ocean is exposed to sunlight for longer periods, causing increase of temperatures across the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. As the ocean gets warmer, it influences global weather patterns, causing changes in monsoon patterns and triggering more destructive cyclones. Data related to these will be gathered during the expedition.
Vishnu Nandan, a remote sensing scientist, is currently working as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Manitoba, Canada. A graduate from the SCT Engineering College, Thiruvananthapuram, he quit his information technology job to take up MSc in Earth Observation Sciences at ITC in Enshcede, The Netherlands, which he completed with a gold medal.
His work was noticed when, as part of the Cryosphere Climate Research Group at the University of Calgary, he was the lead author of studies which found that the declared satellite measurements of seasonal sea ice that formed over the Arctic every year are likely to be incorrect by a substantial degree. This was because of the presence of salts on snow overlying sea ice that had resulted in scientists overestimating the thickness of the Arctic sea ice and giving wrong measurements.