Polar expedition to free the oceans from plastic

Cast off! The adventure begins!

July 22, 2018 At 18.35 local time in Iceland, Nanuq cast off! The crew has  embarked on the first leg of the PolarQuest mission: a ten-day trip on rough Greenland seas, across the Polar Arctic circle,  to reach Longyearbyen, Svalbard archipelago, on board  Nanuq, the self-sufficient and sustainable  sailboat of the expedition.

Currently on board, an international team of arctic sailors, researchers and communicators, some of them very young: Safiria, 19, in charge of microplastic sampling, Kai, 19, in charge of photos and videos, Alberto 20, following up data acquisotion of the cosmic ray detector on board, and Mathilde, 20, co-skipper.The crew includes CERN and INFN research staff, and aims to bringing together scientific research and communication on several relevant phenomena involving the Arctic environment, to be conducted until September 4

• PolarquEEEst (Extrem Energy Events) Cosmic Explorer- An unprecedented programme for the measurement and study of cosmic rays at polar latitudes, with a detector developed at CERN in Geneva by the Enrico Fermi Centre Rome, in collaboration with the INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics), as well as with the participation of school students from Norway, Switzerland and Italy;
• Nanuq-MANTANET-Microplastics sampling programme at sea, for the first time
  above 80 ° N, with a MANTANET sampling net, under the scientific responsibility of ISMAR-CNR Lerici (IT);
• AURORA – Geographical observation programme with consumer-level drones from the North coast of Spitsbergen Island and the coasts of Nordaustlandet, defined by the Geographic Research and Application Laboratory (GREAL) of the European University of Rome and Societa Geografica Italiana;
• Arco di Nobile – Experimentation of a new multi-beamer sonar developed by the Norwegian company NORBIT Subsea for the very detailed three-dimensional scanning of the seabed (as yet uncharted) in the area of maximum probability of the airship ITALIA crash in 1928, first targeted attempt at finding the wreckage of the missing airship. An important historical-geographical component will be the identification of certain areas (towards Nordaustlandet) where it is believed that remains of rescue missions on foot can be found, which in 1928-1929 set off in search of the ITALIA airship.

Follow Polarquest2018 on the live tracker at any time accessible from the expedition website!

Links:

• See where is Nanuq now