Brrr!

The sea ice scientists, and to some extent the biologists are interested to know how much light penetrates though the ice to reach the water below (sunlight light warms up the ice and the water underneath and also allows algae to grow there). How do they measure how much light gets through the ice? Simple: send a diver with a light meter underneath! The first two pictures show a military diver from the crew, getting ready to enter the icy (literally) waters, while the last two pictures (taken by the divers) show the wonderful world underneath. The water temperature is roughly -2, while the air temperature is about -10.

17th May!

The 17th of May is the national day in Norway and it seems to be a day that people really look forward to. Everybody has the day off work and lots of parading and flag waving occurs. I'm not normally a fan of this kind of stuff, but I have to admit I quite enjoyed it. On the ship we celebrated with various 'village-fete' type games on the ice. The first picture shows two of the guys from the crew analysing the aftermath of a fiercely contested nail hammering competition! The last picture shows a pølse (hot dog) and ice cream stand that was erected in the Helicopter hanger after the silliness on the ice subsided.

Ideal Conditions

The first two days of this leg were spent taking temperature and salinity profiles in a region of fairly open drift ice. This is bread and butter oceanography and with ideal weather conditions we've been quite relaxed. The water is about 2.5 km deep so it takes roughly two hours to lower the instrument to the bottom and back -allowing plenty of time to ponder the data. The water is extremely clear here as there are very few plankton and almost no suspended sediment. As a result it's often possible to see the underwater part of ice floes which appear bright turquoise. The second photo shows Laura preparing the instrument package to be deployed, and the last hand photo shows the instrument package abut to surface after a trip to the bottom.

De Noorderlicht ontsnapt!

Here (as promised) is a series of photos showing how we broke the ice around the Noorderlicht in Templefjord. Although the ice was not much more than a meter thick it was quite an operation to carefully break the ice without damaging the Noorderlicht. The basic strategy was to make circuits around the Noorderlicht until a crack made by the KV Svalbard reached one side of the Noorderlicht. Then the process was repeated from the other side so that a circle of ice containing the Nooderlight was split in half and the ship was released. The operation was not all that easy with a ship as big as the KV Svalbard and took several hours. At one point a big piece of ice collided with the Noorderlichts rudder and threatened disaster - this is why the Noorderlichts crew are desperately trying to look under her stern in one picture! Fortunately the rudder was quickly repaired and all ended well.

The last image shows Barentsburg as seen from the KV Svalbard when we steamed past it this evening!

Right, it's late and the first day of Leg Two starts tomorrow so this is all for now...
Paul

Svalbard

I've just come back from a great couple of days in Svalbard! I arrived late on Thursday night. While the plane landed, I could see the KV Svalbard (Paul's ship) coming in to Longyearbyen. I managed to get a free taxi ride from someone and I arrived at the ship while they were still securing the gangplank - good timing! I wasn't sure if I would be allowed on board (it's an army ship after all), but one of the coastguard guys asked me: "Would you like to come on board? Shall I take your bag?" Wow, everyone was so friendly! And it was great to be reunited with Paul of course :)

Longyearbyen is quite a special place. It's changing from a community based on mining to one based on tourism. It was still very much winter there, and everybody moves around on snowmobiles. The first day was extremely windy (with lots of blowing snow) but we were lucky with the weather during the rest of the days - very sunny! (And very light, the midnight sun arrives in mid April here) Here are some photos of the town itself...

On Saturday the coastguard guys had organized a snow scooter tour. I shared a scooter with Paul, and spent most of the trip sitting on the back seat. Sounds like fun, but actually it's very bumpy at the back and you have to hold on tight. My arm muscles were hurting the next day! Here's a photo of the queue for the petrol station and us on the scooter - you have to wear a special suit, boots, and a helmet, like on a motorbike really.

The trip was very long - 120 km one way! We went through beautiful valleys, crossed the sea ice (with many seals lazing around) and spectacular glaciers... I often wished I had a camera on my helmet! We didn't make many photo stops unfortunately. We were with a big group (I think about 14 snowmobiles) and most of them were 19-20 year olds (doing their army survice) who were constantly racing each other. The scooters can go really fast, on flat bits of sea ice we went about 120 km/hr!

These photos are of our final destination: Pyramiden, a Russian mining town abandoned in 1998. It's bizarre to wonder through such a ghost town - there are still flower pots behind the windows and we found a workshop full of skates, bicycles and wooden ski's. We could have spent a lot more time there but after a quick lunch (including hot dogs - Norwegians are truly obsessed with hot dogs!!) it was time to head back. In the last picture you can see the world's northernmost Lenin statue...

We took the same route back, and this time we did have a photo stop at a ship stuck in the ice. The ship is called Noorderlicht - it's a beautiful Dutch sailing ship. They freeze it into the ice on purpose and it's used as a hotel and a basecamp for exploring Svalbard. It won't be frozen in for much longer though, Paul's ship is going to take it out of the ice tonight or tomorrow!

Just before coming back to Longyearbyen, we decided for a little detour to the top of a mountain that overlooks Longyearbyen and the bay. The view was amazing! The sun was shining through holes in the clouds and made bright spots on the sea surface - very spectacular!

It was quite a long and tiring day (250 km in total!), so on Sunday we had a rest day. We slept a lot, and then walked around Longyearbyen for a bit. There was not a lot to see though, everything is closed on Sundays.

On Monday it was time for some action, and we decided to rent a snowmobile again. We also had to rent a gun for protection against polar bears! It was a beautiful day, and we took our time to enjoy the landscape. This time I drove a lot as well, good fun!! I was a bit scared at first but once you get the hang of driving it's a lot of fun, and a lot more comfortable than sitting on the back of the scooter ;)

We went through such beautiful landscapes, mostly very big and empty, though we did pass some huts and even another abandoned Russian mining settlement (a very small one though). We also drove close to the beach, and with the sunny weather and the very salty smell you would almost be tempted to try the water ;)

Our destination that day was the Russian mining town Barentsburg (once owned by the Dutch, hence the name). This is a working mining town! It was very bizarre to suddenly be in Russia - Paul even got a "welcome to Russia" text on his mobile. The town looks quite grim, though the houses are quite colorful and there are many murals. The people were very friendly though, we even got a tour of some science labs from a Russian researcher who was based there for a few weeks.

Things you can do only in Svalbard: walk around town with a gun on your back... We didn't actually see any polar bears, just lots of reindeer (and I'm glad about that!). We also found this hovercraft lying around... how bizarre!

Another view of the town and me eating my sandwiches on some kind of boulevard place...

Barentsburg is only about 55 km from Longyearbyen, it took us about 3 hours each way, including many stops. A really nice trip! Renting a snowmobile is quite expensive, but it was really worth it.

I flew back to Tromso this afternoon, and Paul is now back on the ship for another 3 weeks. I hope he gets some good pictures of freeing the Dutch ship from the ice! I was hoping to come back to a green Tromso (last week almost all the snow had gone), but it has been snowing again!

End of leg 1

After a few days of quite hard work, yesterday provided a welcome opportunity to relax. The ship moored to an ice floe where it stayed for two days while the oceanographers continued to explore Eastwards by helicopter and the sea-ice people and the biologists studied the ice floe the ship was moored to and the things living underneath it. As there is only space for three people in the helicopter I reluctantly stayed behind on the ship (it was a stunning day for flying.).

Even worse, as one of our instruments only works with my laptop and not anyone else's I had to let the helicopterists take my laptop with them. Without a computer I couldn't do much more than label and organise sample bottles for leg 2, but that was actually not such a small task.

Anyway, I had the opportunity to soak just a few rays in a corner sheltered from the wind at lunchtime. It's pretty rare to have more than a few minutes of free time even when spending two months on a research ship as there's almost always something that needs to be done.

And, no sooner had I sat down on the deck than a message crackled over the radio by my side: "Bridge to ice ... there's polar bear about 300m away. Can you see it?" I recognise Steve's voice on a distant walkie-talkie: "Errrm, no there's lots of ridges. Perhaps we should come back to the ship?", "Ummm... yes. Perhaps you should. out."

We were under siege again (excellent!). In the photos you can see the bear approaching. As the beast was heading vaguely towards the gangplank the bridge tried to scare it with the ship's horn (which is truly deafening) but the bear responded with an expression that looked more like anger than fear and sank its teeth a little deeper into one of the biologist's mooring buoys! This float is nearly a meter in diameter and I was pretty amazed the bear could open it's jaws wide enough to bite into the curved surface, but that didn't appear to be a problem! After a while the bear wandered a little further away and then nonchalantly swam across the wake of open water that the ship left as it broke the ice on the way here! Apparently polar bears don't think twice about a quick dip in -2 degree water.

The good weather lasted until late in the evening and yesterday ended in a spectacular sun-almost-set with a thin fog developing over the ice.

This morning the this fog was still hanging over the ice seemingly just a few meters deep, so I hurriedly donned my flying suit and packed a lunch box. Sadly two hours later the fog had still failed to burn off, and the conditions were changing from just-not-quite-good enough-weather to plain old bad weather, so after lunch I accepted I'd probably flown for the last time on this leg and hung my suit up in the hanger. Around dinner time though things began to improve and it looked like my flying sandwiches wouldn't suffer the indignity of being eaten at the dinner table after all :). So got dressed again, jumped into the helicopter and made a bee-line for our last planned station. It was quite a nice flight over huge areas of dark nilus ice that's almost clear enough to see through, but before we reached our station the windscreen (is that the right term?) began to frost over! so we rapidly descended to a low altitude and re-traced our bee-line back to the ship. We'd measured everything we wanted except for these last two stations. As the helicopter touched down we decided it was probably best to call an end to leg 1.

As I write this the ship is extracting itself from the ice flow we were moored to (no dynamite this time) and turning the sharp end to point at Longyearbyen. We should arrive in about two days, at which point I'll be reunited with Hanneke, who is currently sitting in a plane heading to Tromsø.

Dandelions

Today I finally finished my work (for a meeting tomorrow morning) and I had the afternoon off! It was really sunny so I went for a walk around the lake at campus.

I played with the macro function of my camera, always fun! I came back with lots of photos of dandelions... I finally know it is actually pronounced dandeLIONS and not danDElions, the version I used for a long time! Paul thought it was funny and instead of correcting me he started saying it like that as well, which was very confusing! In the end I really didn't know which version was right and I had to ask other people, hehe. I still think my version is prettier though ;) what have they got to do with lions anyway? Though in Dutch their name means horse flowers which also makes no sense. Ahh I just found the origin of the name here, interesting!

Another funny story about dandelions is that my grandfather thought they were weeds and should be removed from the garden, and my mum didn't agree with this at all, she thinks they are pretty. Every time my grandfather came to our place, he would complain about the dandelions in our garden and my mum thought that was funny so on purpose she never removed them (2 stubborn people ;) ). She once gave him a framed photo of my brothers and sister and I in a field full of them... so this was a joke that kept coming back in my family!

Anyway, the best ones are the ones with "parachutes"!

It was really nice to spend some time in the sun! It will be strange to go back to the cold tomorrow... Well Tromso actually had temperatures of up to 18 degrees last week, hard to believe! But in Svalbard temperatures are still below freezing so that will be a bit of a change from English spring time...

Another update

We've been busier than usual the last couple of days, collecting temperature and salinity measurements as well as water samples from the deep. The weather although calm has also been quite dull, so I haven't really had the inclination to take many pictures. However, while I was on the phone last night after finishing work the sky cleared up to leave a great sunset with the last few clouds just disappearing over the horizon. I took the first two photos at about half past midnight - they show just how light it still was!

We were back to work bright and early this morning though but the clear skies of the night before were just a memory and we had a fairly chilly day. The blue thing under tarpaulin in the picture below is a winch with three and a half kilometers of wire on it that allows us to lower instruments to the bottom and to take samples. The crane itself has only a little bit of wire and just holds a pulley over the side of the ship, so it takes a well co-ordinated crane and winch driving to swing things over the side! After the instrument package is in the water the crane driver can go and have a coffee and I can safely control the winch from my computer (USB winch anyone?) which is situated in the nicely heated and insulated shipping container just visible on the extreme right. Being inside is a good thing as it takes about two hours to lower the instruments down to the bottom and back, but it doesn't have any windows so it's a bit sad to be stuck in there on a nice day.

It takes such a long time to lower the instruments because although the package is very heavy in air it doesn't weigh so much in the water. If we veer too quickly there will be no tension on the cable and it can loop and snag around itself in the water - or snatch as the ship rolls, which places enormous strain on the winch. Once the package begins to get deeper though we can speed up as the weight of all that wire hanging over the side maintains enough tension.

A couple of days ago while we were out at sea an unexpected roll, caused the tension to go very low and the wire got a loop in it, which then snatched tight. The cable survived, but the strands were horribly twisted and unravelled close to where the loop was so we had to cut it off at that point! The Norwegian term for this occurrence is getting 'an Englishman' in the wire. No one seems to know where the expression comes from though. I'm just glad this Englishman wasn't driving at the time or there might have been a few jokes....

When the water is more than about a kilometer deep we can't actually tell how deep it is using the echo sounder on the ship, because the speed of sound is influenced by the temperature of the water. We mustn't lower the instrument package to the seabed as the ship will be drifting at up to a knot and the bottom may have nasty sharp rocks (or at least disgusting mud). To avoid hitting the bottom we have an altimeter on the instrument package that tells us how far away the seabed is, but it can only see about 80 meters - so we have to watch it carefully! Whats more when the package is it a depth of 3 km we might have let out as much as 3.5km of wire because the package drifts sideways a bit. Our deepest samples however come from only 5 meters above the seabed, so we have to wind the package up pretty quickly after we get them in case it pendulums downwards, or the ship drifts into shallower water. One final hazard to keep in mind while we're doing this is that the end of the wire is not actually attached to the middle of the winch!!! There is so much strain on the wire if the ship rolls quickly that it's just not possible to fix it there strongly enough... Instead it is simply held in place by always leaving a number of wraps of wire around the winch! If the current/wind is strong we can't reach the bottom with the 3.5km of wire we have due to drift, so we have to remember to stop before we let it go like a kid losing a very expensive balloon. This idea terrifies me when we're working late!

Anyways the joys of deep sampling are over for the first half of this cruise as we are now up on the East Greenland Shelf which is only about 250 m deep. The ice is also getting too thick for the ship, so we will continue to do out sampling using a small winch that we can take in the helicopter and lower small instruments over the side of ice floes. I'm including a couple of pictures of the helicopter hanger and the helicopter taking off. As you can see the weather is still a little grey....

My boss calls the guys lined up along the front of the hanger the 'bug-men' due to their funky helmets - you can see them better in some previous photos. I think they look quite cool, but I'm not exactly sure what their role is. They're always just standing there observing us take off. Apparently if it gets really rough, and the ship rolls too much for the helicopter to land normally, it has to lower a cable and be pulled out of the air and down on to the deck using a winch!! So maybe the bug-men specialise in that kind of activity. If so I hope I never see them doing anything other than standing around looking mean.

Right all for now. Not quite sure if I'll be out in the helicopter tomorrow or back on the ship processing data. Have to wait and see.
P~

Mephistomania

It's a good thing Paul has taken over my blog lately ;) as I haven't had much to write about. Nothing much going on here, have mostly been working hard. A few days ago the Norfolk & Norwich Festival has started though, so I had to get out and enjoy that :)

Last night there was a performance by the Friches Theatre Urbain, a French street theatre group, performing Mephistomania, the story of Faust. In high school we covered this story in German literature, but I forgot most of it except that Faust sold his soul to the devil in return for something. The story was told in several parts and we had to follow the actors (on stilts!) through town. It was hard to follow as they spoke half in French, half in English (and it sometimes took me a while to realize they switched language again hehe) and we couldn't always get near the performance either, it was really busy. We got a bit confused when they started talking about Helen of Troy and for a while we thought they were mixing up stories! But it turns out that she is actually part of the Faust story, as the personification of beauty.

Anyway... the performance was really spectacular with lots of fire and smoke effects. I enjoyed it a lot! Here are the photos I took...

It's Bank Holiday weekend here, but I think I'll have to work unfortunately. Never mind, I have a holiday coming up next week! I'm flying back to Tromso on Tuesday night, and then on to Longyearbyen on Thursday night to meet up with Paul for a few days. Very exciting :)

Ski-races and barbeque

Just a quick update after an afternoon of nice activities. Today was May 1st which is a bank holiday in Norway. We took a few hours break from the science this afternoon and had some ski-races, followed by a barbeque on the ice. The ski-races took place on skis that some of the crew had made out of some spare pallets in the hold - so they weren't exactly cutting edge! Still everybody welcomed the social opportunity after a period of hard work and the competition was pretty keenly fought!

After the races we had a really good barbeque out on the ice - we had to eat the food fairly quickly so that it didn't go cold, but it was delicious and we were all hungry from the exercise so that wasn't a problem!

It's easy to forget that we are actually 200km out to sea on days like this. The ice beneath our feet is only about 1-2 meters thick, and underneath it the old Greenland Sea is still 250m deep. If it weren't for the ice, there would be big blue-green waves and salty spray where we were walking today!

By late afternoon it was time to leave, so the ship was untied from the steel beams that had been used for mooring and we left the last human footprints that the bears will see for a while. As we are using up our supply of steel mooring points a bit faster than we anticipated we experimented with using dynamite to recover some of them from the ice! The beams are inserted into boreholes in the ice and filled fresh water which freezes them in place, so they can't be pulled out easily.

Right, that's all for now. It's time to go and do some final lashing down because now we really are heading for open water and we'll probably wake up in waves tomorrow morning. The forecast is pretty good though so we should be able to do work quickly and be back in the ice in a couple of days...