From July 18 to August 4, U.S. and Canadian scientists, supported by 25 post-secondary students, will share with the public in real-time observations and findings about conditions in the Arctic Ocean in unprecedented interactive broadcasts from the Northwest Passage, conducted from the Swedish Icebreaker Oden. This research will aid understanding of and document climate change effects.

The innovative, 18-day Northwest Passage Project research expedition will depart from the U.S. Air Base in Thule, Greenland and return to Thule after a 2,000-nautical-mile voyage through the Northwest Passage.

On the Oden, operated by the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat (SPRS, https://polar.se/en/), the team will collect water, ice and air samples to improve understanding of the effect of climate warming on the environment and biodiversity in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. 

Led by the University of Rhode Island’s Inner Space Center (ISC), with major funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and additional support from the Heising-Simons Foundation, the expedition will include the first-ever live, interactive broadcasts from the Northwest Passage.  

Public audiences in the U.S. and worldwide will have unprecedented ways to interact with the expedition’s shipboard participants in real time, including via three Facebook Live broadcasts (at http://bit.ly/322hZei, 5 P.M. U.S. E.D.T. July 20; 7 P.M. E.D.T. July 25 and 30) and 36 special events at three science centers: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.; Exploratorium, San Francisco, California; and Alaska SeaLife Center, Seward, Alaska (various times, July 20, 23, 24, 25, 30, 31, and August 1).

Full details of the project’s public broadcast events are available at: http://bit.ly/2J5uHk1.

The project will also be the subject of a two-hour television documentary in 2020: “Frozen Obsession.”