Historic crossover meeting in the North Pole

When the Standards and Intercalibration Committee created the idea of the crossover station – where two different GEOTRACES transect cruises occupy the same sampling station and subsequently compare their TEI data to facilitate intercalibration – we never imagined that the ships would be there at the same time, let alone at the North Pole. But on 7 September 2015 that is exactly what happened in the Arctic Ocean when the US cruise aboard US Coast Guard Cutter Healy who had just finished sampling rendezvoused with German ship Polarstern which would begin theirs. We were both rafted up to the same ice floe and simply walked ca. 1000 m to visit each others ships, labs, and share experiences and knowledge. It was about the halfway point for both cruises and seeing our colleagues was simply the best morale booster an oceanographer could have.

Pictures: (top) USCGC Healy and RV Polarstern at the North Pole, 7 Sept. 2015. ©Stefan Hendricks. Source: blogs.helmholtz.de;
(bottom left) RV Polarstern; (bottom right) USCGC Healy. You can see scientists and crew walking between each ship.

Submitted by Greg Cutter.