Ice Camp

An ice camp is a temporary research station set up on sea ice, usually on thick land-fast or multi-year floes that bear the load of huts, generators, and aircraft. Camps host under-ice oceanography, ice-mechanics and mass-balance work, and acoustic experiments, with runways graded on the floe for resupply. Their siting depends on ice thickness and floe stability, so survey crews profile the floe with drills and EM-Bird-style induction sounders before occupation. The 2019 to 2020 MOSAiC expedition ran an extended drifting camp around the icebreaker Polarstern frozen into the Transpolar Drift, the model for modern Arctic ice-camp science.