This image, taken on top of the icebreaker research vessel Polarstern, shows the delicate process of retrieving an instrument called a CTD (short for conductivity, temperature, depth) that had become trapped under sea ice off the coast of northeastern Greenland.
CTDs, which are anchored to the sea floor, measure how ocean properties such as salinity and temperature vary with depth. At some point, the sea ice had closed over the top of this one, forcing the Polarstern to skirt carefully around the equipment, breaking the ice to rescue it from the freezing ocean.
“You’re crashing into ice and breaking through it. So it wasn’t particularly calm sailing for the majority of the trip,” remembers Richard Jones, who took the image in September 2017 and is the winner of Nature’s 2024 Working Scientist photography competition. His research aims to improve estimates of the rate at which ice is being lost from the world’s glacial ice sheets.
Jones, a glaciologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, highlights the photographic contrast between icebreaker and ice that he’d become used to in his five weeks aboard the Polarstern. “All you really see is blue and white. And sometimes that might feel pretty monotonous, but the colours from the CTD instrument and the orange of the crane contrast the scene and also complement it quite nicely.”
Here are the rest of the winning images from the competition.