2023-05-05 06:00:13
In 2007, the schooner Tara had drifted for five hundred and seven days on the Arctic ice floe, in the footsteps of Fridtjof Nansen. This Norwegian had done the same on his sailboat forward in 1893, hoping to be the first to reach the North Pole. “He missed his shot, but came out alive”, says Romain Troublé, CEO of the Tara Ocean Foundation. Always magnetized by the Arctic, the Tara team and its scientific partners have imagined a new ship specifically designed to drift with the ice and study the evolution of this unique ecosystem under the effect of global warming, over the coming decades.
The launching of Tara Polar Station is scheduled for September 2024, after an 18-month project by Constructions Mécaniques de Normandie in Cherbourg, the launch of which was announced on 17 April. The first wintering will take place in a Greenland fjord, as a “warm-up” before the first polar drift, scheduled from September 2025. It will begin in northern Russia, around 140e meridian east, beyond 82 degrees north. The ship will then be trapped by the ice, which will drag it with it towards the west, at a speed of 10 kilometers per day, for four hundred days.
“Our program has been to create a kind of International Space Station [ISS] of the North Pole, which will drift several times by 2045, when IPCC reports predict the disappearance of the Arctic sea ice in summer”, specifies Romain Troublé. He notes that, until then, scientific expeditions in the Arctic were mainly centered on questions of physics, climate change, demarcation of the borders of maritime zones. “There is a real lack of knowledge about biology”which the floating polar station proposes to fill.
Respect the polar code
The project is a public-private partnership, bringing together 40 laboratories from 15 countries, financed by the French State up to 60%, for a design and construction cost of 20 million euros, and recurring operating costs of 2.5 to 3 million euros per year. Amounts that Romain Troublé, who is still looking for patrons to make up the missing 5% of the budget, compares to some 150 million euros for the Mosaic expedition (from September 2019 to October 2020) aboard the North Starthe research icebreaker of the German Alfred-Wegener Institute.
Tara Polar Station, a merchant navy ship flying the French flag, was designed with the architect Olivier Petit, the specifications insisting on the smallest possible environmental footprint. The polar code imposes an imperative of environmental protection for the activities carried out on the pack ice. In summer, solar panels will produce 20% of the energy needed, but in winter the essential will be provided by reoxygenated frying oil, life insurance to withstand temperatures that can drop to −52°C. Fumes and various effluents will also be treated, to avoid, as far as possible, disturbing the ecosystem that the scientists must study.
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