China’s polar research icebreakers, Xuelong and Xuelong 2, returned to port in Shanghai on Tuesday following the conclusion of the nation’s 16th Arctic expedition, delivering a wide array of scientific milestones.
Operating over a three-month deployment across the Chukchi Plateau, the Canada Basin, and the central Arctic Ocean, the dual-vessel mission executed multidisciplinary marine surveys along the marginal ice zone and coordinated air-ice-ocean observational arrays.
Key oceanographic findings include evidence of intensified subsurface warm water intrusions from the Pacific Ocean into the Canada Basin, as well as the discovery of an expansive, previously undocumented deep-sea hydrothermal plume field along the Gakkel Ridge. Within high-latitude sea-ice zones, scientists recorded significant concentrations of juvenile polar cod, yielding critical baseline data for the Arctic marine food web.
In geophysics, the team achieved a breakthrough along the Gakkel Ridge by constructing an unbroken electrical conductivity profile of the lithosphere spanning a 25-million-year timeline. The data revealed that the base boundary of the lithosphere extends horizontally at a depth of roughly 60 kilometers, confronting established plate-cooling models that project progressive plate thickening over time.
Wang Jinhui, chief of the 16th Arctic expedition team, stated that both the overall scale and aggregate workload of the deployment established historic records. The mission’s output across primary discoveries, theoretical revisions, and field evaluations of domestic polar hardware substantially bolsters scientific modeling of climate change dynamics and informs sustainable development policies in the Arctic basin.