A Kerala scientist's Arctic quest: nosy bears, unending night and icy zen
For a man planning to spend winter on an Arctic ice floe plunged in darkness, Vishnu Nandan seemed in no hurry to pack.Later this week, Nandan, 32, will begin a three to four-week journey from his home in Calgary, Canada, to the RV Polarstern, a German research ship frozen in place atop moving sea ice near the North Pole -- not unlike a chocolate chip encrusted in a cookie.Vishnu Nandan may be a veteran of several polar expeditions -- 16, to be precise, both to the Arctic and the Antarctic -- but that doesn't mean life aboard the Polarstern will be easier for it.
By Ganesh Radha-Udayakumar: For a man planning to spend winter on an Arctic ice floe plunged in darkness, Vishnu Nandan seemed in no hurry to pack.

Asked on Tuesday if he had begun, he answered coolly: "Nope."

The emoji on the WhatsApp screen smiled in the manner of one obviously flirting with danger. "I will start tonight," Nandan said.

Danger is abundant where Vishnu Nandan, a remote sensing scientist from Kerala, is headed. It is, in fact, one of the few abundant things in a wilderness ruled by scarcity: a scarcity not just of warmth -- the last sunlight for months was an amber sliver on the horizon before it vanished -- but also of colour and comfort.

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Later this week, Nandan, 32, will begin a three to four-week journey from his home in Calgary, Canada, to the RV Polarstern, a German research ship frozen in place atop moving sea ice near the North Pole -- not unlike a chocolate chip encrusted in a cookie. Snowstorms are common here. Temperatures, in the negative, read like respectable test cricket scores. Deeply inquisitive polar bears roam free.

But where there are perils, there is also intellectual excitement. Polarstern is essentially a floating lab; for a whole year it will be home base for hundreds of experts from 19 countries, all taking part in a polar expedition of unprecedented scale. They will collect valuable new data about the Arctic's changing climate, whose effects are felt across the globe.

Vishnu Nandan, 32, is the only Indian on the ship; he represents both his country and the University of Manitoba's Centre for Earth Observation Science, where he's currently a post-doctoral fellow. He will remain on board till late February.

In phone interviews with IndiaToday.in, he explained how his own expertise helps the expedition, known as MOSAiC (Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate).

MELTING LIKE CONFIDENCE DURING A BAD DATE

Imagine you're on a first date, but you aren't really feeling it. It isn't your companion's fault -- he's quite charming, actually -- but that aggravating conversation at work is still stuck in your head. Your date notices. His mood dampens. He wonders if you would rather be somewhere else. His confidence begins to melt: he starts talking too much and too fast; his humour now sounds forced; he's trying too hard. Suddenly you really are considering texting a friend to call with an "emergency".

Now, what does this have to do with a warming Arctic? More than you might think.

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Your perceived lack of interest set off a chain of events that made the date gloomier and gloomier still for both you and your companion. That's a simple example of a "positive" feedback loop: yes, positive, because the trend (of ever increasing gloom) reinforced itself. And it is such loops that govern Arctic climate and its effects elsewhere.

When reflective white surfaces like ice recede due to warming, more sunlight is absorbed. This accelerates warming and eats up more ice. Melting sea ice also makes it easier for the atmosphere to draw heat from ocean water, causing even more ice to melt. As the TED-Ed video below explains, such feedback loops can reduce the difference in temperature between the poles and the mid-latitudes, disrupting weather across the globe in dangerous ways.

Arctic sea ice is a key research focus for the MOSAiC expedition. A graphic generated by NASA, captivating and alarming in equal measure, shows how this ice cover expands, spins and shrinks with the seasons each year -- and how much it has thinned between the mid-1980s and the current decade.

Now, MOSAiC researchers like Vishnu Nandan "will have the opportunity to continually monitor changes in the ice throughout every season", the expedition's website says.

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Nandan specialises in using radar to monitor changes in polar sea ice thickness; he will collect measurements using surface-based radar sensors that have already been deployed around Polarstern, the German research vessel.

But why radar?

Nandan explains: unlike optical satellites, radar works in the absence of sunlight, in the unending night of the Arctic winter.

A winter, as you'll soon see, that's capable of shaping much more than choices of equipment.

Vishnu Nandan posing with a surface-based radar sensor in Cambridge Bay in the Canadian Arctic, in 2018. The sensor emits radar waves that penetrate sea ice and help researchers understand its geophysical state.

'A PHILOSOPHER-SAINT'

Vishnu Nandan may be a veteran of several polar expeditions -- 16, to be precise, both to the Arctic and the Antarctic -- but that doesn't mean life aboard the Polarstern will be easier for it.

"It's cold. It's dark. There is no sunlight, so there is a big deficiency of Vitamin D...and on top of it, your loved ones are in Canada, in India, and all over the place. There is limited means of communication. You can get easily depressed," he said.

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And the forbidding conditions can test relationships, even with friends. "You see the real character of these people when you work with them in the Arctic, under tough, emotional and technically challenging conditions," Nandan said. "You get to see their real faces."

Due to the #storm over the weekend, some new cracks showed up on our floe. The ice movement opened a lead between #Polarstern and 3 of our #science stations. The entire logistics team worked on the ice, pulling out the cables, which got trapped in the lead.



: Esther Horvath pic.twitter.com/JMBJYJGLNc MOSAiC Expedition (@MOSAiCArctic) November 19, 2019

When he was growing up in Thiruvananthapuram, Vishnu Nandan didn't dream of icy climes. His current life, he says, "just happened". But his own account describing how is worth a quick retelling: he began as a rookie engineer in TCS, where he resigned "before they threw me out"; he then sat for 71 exams ("I'm not kidding."), for everything from the Indian Engineering Services to the post of assistant loco pilot in the Railways; he finally caught a break with a scholarship to earn a master's degree in earth observation sciences in the Netherlands.

Last week, Nandan grew a touch poetic -- and not a little jocular -- as he contemplated life after a long Arctic sejourn cut off from the world.

"It's silent. You get this profound peace," he told IndiaToday.in. "I'm sure I'll have a bigger, longer beard and moustache when I come back, with better insights about the whole planet."

"I'll most probably become like a philosopher-cum-saint."

He already has the laugh: warm, hearty, free.

Vishnu Nandan in the East Siberian Sea in 2017.