Just a brief one today since I've been working for 17 hours and also because we're going to hit the iceberg (hopefully not literally) tomorrow at 5 am. And since it's all for telly everyone has already gone to bed because they'd like to look nice and rosy on camera when the berg first appears on the horizon. So, set sail last night at 00.01 (because the captain thinks it's bad luck to leave on a monday), heading straight west from Ilulisat, across Baffin Bay and will reach Baffin Island in the early morning - that's where the berg is grounded.
For the next 10 days Prof Peter and I want to measure how the iceberg responds the waves that hit it - how it bends, stretches, compresses and eventually breaks up. For that we have
a) a waverider buoy that measures the swell and waves that are coming in
b) super high-resolution GPS sensors that will measure how the iceberg moves and stretches
c) a set of tiltmeters that will record how it mends.
There's 3 other teams of scientist (7 of us in total). The others do
1) sonar and laser scanning of the edge of the berg (Richard Bates, St. Andrews)
2) drilling and coring of the berg (Keith Nicholls, BAS)
3) seismic measurements and water properties (Alon Stern, NYU)
The BBC are shooting a 2 times 1 hour documentary (to be aired on BBC 2 on Sept 9 and Sept 16, 9pm) about the life cycle of an iceberg. They filmed the birth on a glacier the last 3 weeks in Greenland, and now with us they want to document its death, off the Canadian coast for 2 weeks. The show is centered around 2 presenters: Chris Packham and Helen Czerski. There's also medicine man Chris van Tulleken and extreme diver and climber Andy Torbent. As mentioned previously, there's a BBC website (link above) with lots of images and videos (mainly of the first half so far). But I'll obviously try and give you my version of the story.
But now off to bed, all my instruments seem to be working and I need to look nice and rosy tomorrow.
