RV Polarstern is a German research icebreaker of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany. Polarstern was commissioned in 1982 and is mainly used for research in the Arctic and Antarctica. It is planned that she will be replaced by Polarstern II around the year 2020, after it was decided that the European Research Icebreaker Aurora Borealis will not be built in her original form. Polarstern was built by Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft in Kiel and Nobiskrug in Rendsburg. The ship has a length of 118 metres and is a double-hulled icebreaker. She is operational at temperatures as low as Polarstern can break through ice thick at a speed of. Thicker ice up to thick can be broken by ramming.
History
On 7 September 1991, Polarstern, assisted by the Swedish arctic icebreaker reached the North Pole as the first conventional powered vessels. Both scientific parties and crew took oceanographic and geological samples and had a common tug of war and a football game on an ice floe. In 2001, Polarstern together with reached the pole again. She returned for a third time on 22 August 2011. This time she reported the most frequently recurring ice thickness at compared with in 2001. On 2 March 2008, one of the vessel's helicopters crashed on a routine flight to the AntarcticNeumayer II base. The German pilot and a Dutch researcher were killed, three other passengers were injured. On 17 October 2008, Polarstern was the first research ship ever to travel through both the Northeast Passage and the Northwest Passage in one cruise, thus circumnavigating the North Pole. On 20 September 2019, she sailed from Tromsø, Norway, for a 12 to 14 month-long Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate expedition across the Arctic. She settled in an ice floe on 4 October 2019 and will drift in it past the North pole eventually reaching open water in the Fram Strait. While stuck in the ice in March 2020, a member of the aircraft team who had not yet joined the ship in the Arctic tested positive for COVID-19. This resulted in the entire aircraft team being placed in isolation in Germany and caused delays in the retrieval of scientific data from around the ship to provide context to the data taken aboard.
Expeditions updates
Current listings of all cruises on boardPolarstern as well as associated content are presented in AWI's research platform portal.
The ship plays a central role in German musician Schiller's 2010 album Atemlos. A track is titled after the ship. It is also featured in the DVD of the same title, showing the musician's expedition on the vessel.
