“If you’re a sea ice person, MOSAiC is the kind of experiment that you just live for,” said Don Perovich, a Dartmouth College researcher with the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate. “It’s the kind of experiment you dream about. It’s an opportunity to spend a whole year on the ice, just watching how a floe evolves over time.” He spoke at a recent event sponsored by IARPC Collaborations, an Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee (IARPC) member space where scientists and others involved in Arctic research share knowledge and resources. The researchers on the expedition, said Perovich, aimed to collect data that would shed light on the causes and consequences of the evolving and diminished Arctic sea ice cover. MOSAiC’s mission was to facilitate a breakthrough in understanding the Arctic climate system and improve the world’s climate and weather forecasting models.

At this time of year, in Russia’s far north Laptev Sea, the sun hovers near the horizon during the day, generating little warmth, as the region heads towards months of polar night. By late September or early October, the sea’s shallow waters should be a vast, frozen expanse.

But not this year. For the first time since records have been kept, open water still laps this coastline in late October though snow is already falling there.

Former Vice President Biden’s recent Foreign Affairs article on his proposed presidential policies hit on all major hot spots of U.S. interest globally but one, said Mike Sfraga, director of the Wilson Center’s Global Risk and Resilience Program and Polar Institute, in a recent episode of Wilson Center NOW.

“The Arctic should be a part of the foreign policy dynamic of the United States,” said Sfraga. Global politics, economics, security, and the environment connect in countless ways throughout the region, only some of which show up in headlines.

“In 1959, he knew it was coming,” said Delbert Pungowiyi, a Yupik native of Savoonga, Alaska, on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea in an interview at the Wilson Center’s 8th Syymposium on the Impacts of an Ice-Diminishing Arctic on Naval and Maritime Operations. “He prepared me my whole life for this. It is a crisis.”

The Arctic is changing, and it’s changing fast, even faster than models had predicted. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report found with strong confidence that the Arctic is warming two to three times faster than the global average.

“We’re attempting to do something that’s never been done before in world history,” said Senator Angus King (I-ME). “The peaceful development of a major new physical asset.” He spoke of the Arctic Ocean at the 8^th Symposium on the Impacts of an Ice-Diminishing Arctic on Naval and Maritime Operations. The symposium was hosted by the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute, in partnership with the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, U.S. National Ice Center, Arctic Domain Awareness Center, Patuxent Partnership, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center.

“We are stripping the life away from the blue planet,” said oceanographer, explorer, and author, Sylvia A. Earle. She keynoted a recent event on marine protected areas in Antarctica and the high seas co-hosted by the Wilson Center and The Pew Charitable Trusts with support from the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation. “Do we want a planet like Mars?” she said. “Most people would say, ‘I don’t think so. I like to breathe. I like water that falls magically out of the sky. I like having a living planet.’”