He lived for four months on an ice floe in the Arctic and met 31 polar bears. But there was something else that scared him more.

When Morven Muilwijk reached the iceberg in May, the ice was two meters thick. When he went home, there was only half a meter left.

– The trend is very scary, he says.

He doesn’t think of the 31 polar bears he found on the ice floe.

Morven Muilwijk is a marine and climate researcher at the Bjerknes Center and the University of Bergen. Since September last year, several dozen researchers have taken turns based on the same iceberg. They started north of Siberia and have followed the ice floe drifting across the Arctic Ocean until it disintegrated in the Fram Strait in early August.

It is the first time since Fridtjof Nansen floated through the ice with “Fram” in 1910 that scientists have followed the ice in the Arctic so closely and for so long. 16 nations participate.

The project, MOSAiC, is one of many being carried out to find out what happens when the Arctic warms three to four times faster than the rest of the world.