Imagine that you left earth before coronavirus and returned this week. That is pretty much what has happened to a team of 87 people on board the icebreaker Polarstern, who spent the past six months doing climate research in the Arctic and arrived back on land a few days ago.
The world greeting them is familiar, yet changed. Smiles have been replaced by masks; people avoid each other when walking down the street. And while the researchers were at sea, the topic they were studying — climate change and emissions — underwent the biggest shift in our lifetimes. With the world in lockdown, emissions will see their biggest drop this year since the second world war.
For the team who were on the icebreaker, it is a lot to take in. “On the Polarstern, we had only a very vague feeling about what actually the consequence of coronavirus on society is,” chief scientist Torsten Kanzow told me, recalling conversations with family over a patchy satellite connection. “There are lessons to be learnt, for sure; you can’t count on many things that you used to count on.”