DOI: 10.1594/pangaea.943818
title: Physical properties of sea ice cores from site MCS-SYI measured on legs 1 to 3 of the MOSAiC expedition

description: We present sea ice temperature and salinity data from first-year ice (FYI) and second-year ice (SYI) relevant to the temporal development of sea ice permeability and brine drainage efficiency from the early growth phase in October 2019 to the onset of spring warming in May 2020. Our dataset was collected in the central Arctic Ocean during the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) Expedition in 2019 to 2020. MOSAiC was an international transpolar drift expedition in which the German icebreaker RV Polarstern anchored into an ice floe to gain new insights into Arctic climate over a full annual cycle. In October 2019, RV Polarstern moored to an ice floe in the Siberian sector of the Arctic at 85 degrees north and 137 degrees east to begin the drift towards the North Pole and the Fram Strait via the Transpolar Drift Stream. The data presented here were collected during the first three legs of the expedition, so all the coring activities took place on the same floe. The end dates of legs 1, 2, and 3 were 13 December, 24 February, and 4 June, respectively. The dataset contributed to a baseline study entitled, Deciphering the properties of different Arctic ice types during the growth phase of the MOSAiC floes: Implications for future studies. The study highlights downward directed gas pathways in FYI and SYI by inferring sea ice permeability and potential brine release from several time series of temperature and salinity measurements. The physical properties presented in this paper lay the foundation for subsequent analyses on actual gas contents measured in the ice cores, as well as air-ice and ice-ocean gas fluxes. Sea ice cores were collected with a Kovacs Mark II 9 cm diameter corer. To measure ice temperatures, about 4.5 cm deep holes were drilled into the core (intervals varied by site and leg) . The temperatures were measured by a digital thermometer within minutes after the cores were retrieved. The ice cores were placed into pre-labelled plastic sleeves sealed at the bottom end. The ice cores were transported to RV Polarstern and stored in a -20 degrees Celsius freezer. Each of the cores was sub-sampled, melted at room temperature, and processed for salinity within one or two days. The practical salinity was estimated by measuring the electrical conductivity and temperature of the melted samples using a WTW Cond 3151 salinometer equipped with a Tetra-Con 325 four-electrode conductivity cell. The practical salinity represents the the salinity estimated from the electrical conductivity of the solution. The dataset also contains derived variables, including sea ice density, brine volume fraction, and the Rayleigh number.
description: utility: Each core was retrieved for a different purpose. 'CH4' = methane, 'HALO' = halocarbon, 'BROMO' = bromoform, 'TEMP' = temperature (then used for subsequent analysis), 'CORE_LONG' = long sea ice core (top of ice surface to ocean) on rare days when short cores with higher ice depth resolution sampling were retrieved. The short cores were not included in the time series of the related study. Additional cores labelled 'ISO' (for stable water isotope analysis) are not shown here and were not included in the time series of the related study, because the sampling scheme for laboratory measurements changed during the field campaign. Normally, the BROMO or HALO core was used for temperature profiles at the BGC1, BGC2, and BGC3 sites. Note that the utility name represents a minimum utility for each core. For example, a BROMO core was sometimes used for HALO as well. This is because there were situations were melted ice samples of separate ice cores were combined for a given ice depth sampling range. Hence, this dataset shows the available salinity profiles and the utility field is used to distinguish one profile from another with the same device operation