History
On September 7, 1991, Polarstern, assisted by the Swedish arctic ice breaker Oden reached the North Pole as the first conventional powered vessels. Both scientific parties and crew took oceanographic and geological samples and had a common tug of war and a football game on an ice floe. Polarstern again reached the pole exactly 10 years later together with the USCGC Healy. It returned for a third time on August 22, 2011 at exactly 9.42 a.m. This time it reported the most frequently recurring ice thickness at 0.9m compared with 2m in 2001, which corresponds to the long-term average.
On March 2, 2008, one of the vessel's helicopters crashed on a routine flight to the Antarctic Neumayer II base. The German pilot and a Dutch researcher were killed, three other passengers injured.
On October 17, 2008, Polarstern, as the first research ship ever traveled through both the Northeast Passage and the Northwest Passage in one cruise and thus circumnavigated the North Pole.
| Captain | Start | End |
|---|---|---|
| Lothar Suhrmeyer | December 1982 | November 1992 |
| Dieter Zapf | June 1983 | May 1985 |
| Ernst-Peter Greve | July 1985 | August 1998 |
| Heinz Jonas | March 1987 | December 1995 |
| Heinz Allers | January 1994 | October 1995 |
| Uwe Pahl | March 1996 | unknown |
| Jürgen Keil | March 1996 | March 2003 |
| Dr. Martin Boche | July 2000 | July 2002 |
| Uwe Domke | October 2002 | October 2004 |
| Stefan Schwarze | January 2005 | unknown |
Read more about this topic: RV Polarstern
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“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
““And now this is the way in which the history of your former life has reached my ears!” As he said this he held out in his hand the fatal letter.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)