"When Ian Raphael returned to the United States after about six months in the Arctic, he encountered a very different environment from the one he had left," reports the Valley News.

"Raphael, a graduate student at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering, was one of about 60 scientists and 40 crew members that are part of the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate, better known as MOSAiC. The purpose of the year-long project is to collect data on how the Arctic is changing, how the ice is melting and how it is impacting polar marine life. Raphael departed in September and returned at the end of March.

“'I was out there for six months, so I had a lot of time to imagine what it would be like to come home and how wonderful it would be to see my friends and my family,' Raphael said during a Zoom interview from Bremerhaven, Germany, where is getting ready to return to the Arctic.

"He and the scientists of MOSAiC on the German research vessel Polarstern were studying 'how fast the ice is growing and the snow was impacting that growth' and 'how storms and other large atmospheric events are changing the ice.'"