A ship deliberately frozen into the Arctic ice is nearly free. A little over a year after the Tara was encased in the ice north of Russia it is expected to be released somewhere between Greenland and Svalbard.

Ice around the ship has already cracked, forcing scientists manning the various instruments they had deployed on the ice around her back on board.

“Within the space of 15 minutes our ‘back garden’ transformed into a mass of fractured blocks with open water between. Heaving on a slight swell and jostling amongst the ice floes Tara found her level floating line,” says Grant Redvers, expedition leader, on the ship’s log for 13 December.

In fact, they knew the ice was about to break, due to the ship’s dogs. “They both came back on board,” says Grant Redvers, the expedition chief (Times). “Normally it’s really hard to persuade them to get back on the ship. An hour or so later the ice fractured around us.”

As the Times reports, Tara was trapped in the ice, “partly in a recreation of an historic voyage, partly on a scientific expedition and partly on an old-fashioned adventure”.

One of the most interesting pieces of science from the Tara mission is how fast the ship has crossed the Arctic – the transpolar drift speed. “…the Tara was expected to take two years, but the conveyor belt of the Arctic appears to have been accelerated – the expedition is almost over barely a year after it began,” Redvers told the Times. “At the same time the ice pack that the Tara is crossing has shrunk drastically. The point at which it was first wedged into the ice in September 2006 was more than 280 miles south of the ice edge in September this year. It now seems possible that the Arctic ice pack could disappear entirely within the next 15 years.”

A list of scientific findings released in October is here.