Dispatch 16: Mooring B Deployed and a Polar Bear Sighting!
Jennifer Kosty (Yale University)
October 4, 2025
17:00 local, 77.59◦N, 149.58◦W
Conditions:
- Cloudy
- 90% sea ice cover
- -8◦C
- Sunrise: 4-Oct-2025 10:57
- Sunset: 4-Oct-2025 20:34
- Day length: 9 hours, 37 minutes
And that’s a wrap on the mooring operations for the 2025 BGOS/JOIS expedition! This morning, we redeployed Mooring B. The deployment process went smoothly, thanks to the help of our amazing deck crew. However, we had some unexpected excitement about half-way through the deployment when a polar bear was spotted approaching the Louis! Everyone came out to the fore deck to snap pictures and watch our new polar bear friend wander around the ice floes. Meanwhile, the deployment process continued with roughly 3800 m of wire and numerous instruments being lowered into the ocean. The polar bear ended up remaining nearby for the duration of Mooring B’s deployment, which we finished around 3 pm. Afterwards, we were happy to escape from the cold to celebrate our third and final mooring deployment. Huge thanks to the crew for helping make this year’s mooring work such a success!
With no time to waste, the day watch immediately began a quick 500 m CTD rosette cast to collect samples for DNA analysis. We then started steaming towards CB-11, where the night watch will complete another 3800 m CTD rosette cast early tomorrow morning. Transiting between stations is getting slightly more challenging due to the thicker ice in this region. However, this thick ice is promising as we begin to search for ice floes that are large enough for our upcoming ice work!






