A Romanian Woman Following in Nansen’s Footsteps

A multinational polar exploration mission , including the Romanian Adela Dumistrascu, studied the impact of climate change in the Arctic

Ana-Maria Cononovici, 24.03.2026, 12:09

A multinational polar exploration mission has arrived in the Arctic aboard the Polarstern (Polar Star), a labyrinthine ship filled with crew cabins and variously equipped research laboratories. When on expedition, meteorologists, biologists, physicists, and oceanographers live in cabins with two bunk beds, three to a cabin. The Mosaic expedition, as it was named, set out to study climate change, a topic that is becoming increasingly urgent, as confirmed by Adela Dumitrașcu, a Romanian originally from Brașov and now living in Sweden, who was part of the research team.

“These are changes we see with our own eyes, and they are also analyzed and confirmed by the data we collected during that expedition. But now the question is whether we are prepared as a society, as humanity, for these changes, because they will affect all coastal areas around the world, to a greater or lesser extent. And our society, our cities, are located in coastal areas.”

An oceanographer, geophysicist, and research engineer, Adela Dumitrașcu studies sea ice and the impact of climate change on its thickness and structure. On the Mosaic expedition, the researchers followed in Nansen’s footsteps, but with the benefit of far more advanced techniques:

“The Mosaic Expedition was the largest polar expedition organized since the late 1800s. Nansen was not merely a polar explorer. In the late 1800s, all explorers wanted to conquer the North Pole and the South Pole, to plant a flag somewhere. But Nansen was first and foremost a scientist, and his idea was to let his ship, the Fram, freeze in. He had a theory about how the ocean currents worked at the North Pole, and his plan was: we’ll take the ship to a specific point off the coast of Siberia, the ship will freeze in and drift with the ice, and after a few years it will break free from the ice, and we’ll find out if the currents really do move at that rate. And he studied the climate and took ice and water samples at the same time. When Nansen was at the Pole in the late 1800s, the ice was 5 meters thick, so it was pretty much impossible to break through such thick ice. No one has been to the North Pole during the winter; only in the summer do icebreakers go and can break the ice, because it’s thinner. But the climate has changed; the ice isn’t as thick anymore. So the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany had the idea to replicate Nansen’s expedition to some extent and freeze an icebreaker somewhere near the same area where Nansen’s ship froze, off the coast of Siberia, and drift with the ice for a year. So we calculated that it would take us a year this time to drift with the ice and reach the Fram Strait. It took us less than a year—in fact, it took us around nine months—because the ice has completely changed and there have been no studies on it so far. Theoretically, we can imagine what winter is like at the North Pole, but we want to collect data in situ, not extrapolate the data we have from the summer, and so you need to have teams that are there on the ice all the time.”

The goal of the mission was to study climate models to see how the climate will change in the future. Adela Dumitrașcu added:

“The idea was to study the entire column, from the ocean floor to the stratosphere. And that requires many different teams. We’re talking about oceanography, ice physics, biochemistry, and atmospheric sciences. There were 600 researchers, and 20 countries contributed financially to this major expedition. Sweden contributed both financially and logistically, because we have an icebreaker. Our goal for the year-long expedition was to be there when the ice forms—usually in September—when it starts to refreeze, marking the end of summer. At the North Pole, autumn begins and the ice refreezes, and that’s when the gases we’re studying get trapped in the forming ice. Our goal was to be there from the start of the expedition until spring arrives, so to speak, at the North Pole, when the light returns, the ice begins to melt slightly, and the gases—which are highly volatile—are released into the atmosphere immediately. So we lose them from the ice.”

There are alarming observations that should give us food for thought, as Adela Dumitrașcu stressed:

“The ice is much thinner, much different; it has an impact on the atmosphere because these ‘black spaces,’ as we call them, form when the ice breaks. Then the ocean water, which no longer reflects as much as it should, has an impact on the atmosphere, the stratosphere. And of course, when we talk about the ocean, we see that the temperature has changed—it has warmed, a small increase of half a degree. Because a one-degree increase is already a massive change; when we talk about ocean water, we see new species moving in. Naturally, once the water temperature changes, different species arrive or leave.”

Conservation, recycling, reuse, but above all raising awareness, are the only ways for humanity to survive. (MI)