I thought about saving this for the real end of the cruise, but now seems a good time.
I want to thank the many people who put this expedition together. There were scientific questions to be addressed, and many people have made it possible to address those questions (many of them are here on Oden, but there are others back onshore in Sweden and Russia and elsewhere).



There will likely be intense discussions amongst scientists who were on this cruise, about how to organize, analyze, and understand all the data everyone has collected. The outside world will probably not pay much attention to those discussions. But they are how science progresses. As Patrick likes to say, scientists are in the “questions business”, not the answers business. I take that to mean that when we answer a question well, it often provokes a flurry of new questions. The results of SWERUS-C3 may do just that. Where we found what we expected, and where we didn’t find what we expected, the expedition pushes wider the sphere of knowledge.

But for the opportunity to gain that new knowledge, I have to thank Örjan Gustafsson and Igor Semiletov, the Swedish and Russian chief scientists on SWERUS-C3, who did a truly amazing amount of work to make this expedition happen; convincing the right people that the expedition should happen.

Also, thank you to Polarforskningssecretariat (Swedish Polar Research Secretariat) for organizing the expedition, and of course to the several funders of the expedition.

But money and planning are only two aspects: someone(s) has (have) to go and put a ship in the Arctic Ocean and make it go. That is no small task. Thank you to the crew of Oden, who have made a voyage through what can be a very difficult and inhospitable (to people, not polar bears and seals) place, an amazing experience.



Late this “morning” we almost saw a sunset for the first time on the cruise. Nearly 180 degrees away from that sunset was an Arctic Moon.