Canada!

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.

Operation Iceberg

After an eventful trip to Fram Strait, Peter and I had a quick refreshing stopover in civilisation (one night in copenhagen).  This morning we flew to Ilulisat (formerly Jakobshavn) in West Greenland to join the BBC Science team for the documentary Operation Iceberg (there's a link to the Op Iceberg homepage above). The ship this time is the Islandic MV Neptune and it is (in all honesty) not the Arctic Sunrise - I just miss all the funky hippie drawings and decorations. I'm sharing a cabin with Prof Peter and Keith Nicholls and Povl Abrahamsen of BAS, so it'll be cosy. We'll leave port this evening and will transit to the other side of Baffin Bay where we want to survey a huge (possibly grounded) iceberg (3 times the size of Manhatten) for the next 2 weeks. Oh yes - Ilulisat is fantastic, it's a small harbour town and there is thousands and thousands of small and large icebergs around. I hope that we'll have fairly steady internet on the ship so I'll soon write more about what the plan is and who is involved and why bother.

This must be my favourite action photo ever:

    (Photo: Alex Yellop for Greenpeace)

No reason to wear a helmet whatsoever!

What's happening on the Arctic Sunrise?

a link to introductions of the scientists onboard the ship

Seeing Arctic sea ice in 3D

a Blog on the Greenpeace website by our expedition leader Frida Brengtsson

How to get Stuck part II

In our frantic quest for (initially) ice floes and (afterwards) the AUV we had half unwittingly drifted further and further west, into increasingly thick and dense ice. Without helicopter we had no means to realize that we were getting stuck between two gigantic floes (>50 km^2) that were slowly converging on us. We had been beset (that's the official term, I think) for 30h when, on Wednesday after lunch, the ship started listing (tilting to one side). I had been napping in my bunk (what else to do when you're frozen into the ice?) and was woken up by Henning Mankell falling off the shelf, right onto my nose. There were shouts, people running in the corridors, and I was very confused. When I got out onto deck the ship was listing portside about 15 degrees, increasing. The pressure by the surrounding ice had grown so strong that it was squashing the ship. Fortunately, the Arctic Sunrise is half an icebreaker and was thus built to rise above the ice when the pressure becomes too large (like Nansen's 'Fram') rather than being pulverized by the converging floes (like Shackelton's 'Endurance'). The list increased to about 20 degrees, then stopped. After a while the pressure let off a little and the Captain was able to move the ship a few meters into a safer position. Towards the evening, after 40h of complete immobility the wind direction changed and we found a little space to navigate. In the following 12h we made about 2 miles progress through the pack (whilst still drifting west at 0.3 m/h). Thursday ze good germans came to our assistance - the Alfred-Wegener-Institut sent an aircraft that scouted leads and a way out of the heavy ice for us. In the early hours of Friday, after more than 3 days of stuckedness, we escaped the ice and arrived earlier today (Saturday morning) in the safe harbour of Longyearbyen. We lost a third of our science time and the AUV to the ice, but right now everybody seems to be rather happy to be back here.  

How to get Stuck in Eternal Ice

It has been a race against the clock from the very start. Our time on the Arctic Sunrise was limited to a total of 12 days - subtracting 36 hours on each side for transit leaves you with a grand total of 9 days to perform a scientific operation that is usually done on a 40 day cruise. 


This meant working pretty much 24/7 (facilitated by daylight day and night). You still try and keep a semi-regular routine, getting up for breakfast, having fixed lunch and dinner times, but working shifts 0-4am, then 4-8am the next night and so on makes things really confusing after a while. 
We were powering along with surprising success, had already scanned top and bottom of 3 floes and ventured further into the pack, mooring to a 4th. Weather was clear, but the wind had picked up and the currents were strong. On ice work was going swimmingly, Joseph and Will scanning away and we were drilling hole after hole. The ice started to close in slowly, but the currents seemed to calm down a bit so the AUV went in the water. But what we had been seeing on the ship was deceptive and the currents at 20m depth were stronger than ever - and before anyone could react the beloved Fish was swept 200m downstream and soon enough stopped talking to us. A hectic 24 hours of search operations followed, but these were increasingly impeded by the closing ice. And then, on Tuesday morning, nothing was moving no more. 

Rotating Worlds, Running Bears and maybe a Stamukha.

(by till - 79.5N 0.2E)

Having heroically rescued Polargirl we had a lovely calm 20h transit to the ice edge and enter the (not so) eternal white in magical conditions - the water is glassy, the midnight sun beams down on us, seals are popping up their heads nearby and dolphins are shyly showing their fins in the distance. But we're not here to enjoy the scenery and a hectic, anxious search kicks in for the first survey-able floe.

The criteria that our floe has to satisfy are multifold: it has to be strong enough to not break up and disintegrate over the time we measure it, it needs to feature a pressure ridge and an adjacent part of level ice, there has to be a large area of open water to deploy the AUV and finally, it needs to be safe to work on.

So odds are against us, but miraculously we get lucky after just a few hours of searching. An almost perfect floe is found, covered in surprising amounts of snow, with lots of ridges and enough level ice. Everyone goes to work with utter determination, the conditions are still good, even though fog starts to creep in from the west. But before nightfall (which doesn't exist up here) the floe is laser scanned, cored and drilled - just the AUV survey is lacking. The AUV is steered by echo-sounding - like an underwater bat. And it works under the assumption that the world doesn't move very much whilst it is under the ice. But the region we find ourselves in features strong currents and our floe is rotating like a spinning top. And alas, the AUV gets all dizzy on its mission, loses the orientation a little and surfaces like a drunken turtle - but fortunately it pops to the surface in open water and not under some huge pressure ridge. And who would have thought - in all its dizziness it passed actually underneath the whole floe and completed its survey. Cheers and happy smiles all round! 

We pack up and are off on our way to the next piece of floating ice. But the arctic gods apparently feel like they were bit generous the last two days. Thick fog sets in, the ice compactifies, the old Arctic Sunrise labours her way slowly through the sparse openings she finds. The ice around us consists of huge floes of treacherously thin, rotting first year ice and nobody is all too keen to set foot on these pieces. For 15 hours the search continues, the visibility is bad and the general mood on steady decline. In a bridge meeting full of tired faces it is decided that we'll change our course to South-West and abandon the idea of heading further North. 

5 minutes later there is a shout from the crow's nest and a huge lump appears on the horizon, its highest point reaching up to the bow of the ship and most astonishingly, it is covered in black-brown dirt - a completely different sight to all the flat cakes that one usually gets in these regions. It is quickly agreed that this mount has to be surveyed, whatever it is. And Peter Wadhams explains that there are essentially two options: it might be a small iceberg that broke off Franz Josef Land a while ago or it might indeed be a Stamukha. Stamukhi are large pressure ridges that are grounded for years off the cost of Siberia and are flooded by river water during the summer melt. The river water carries large amounts of sediments which might explain the dirt we find on our pressure ridge. The next morning the sun is shining in her full glory (she actually defeated the fog sometime around 2am - the whole 24h sun shine thing still really confuses me). Everyone is settling into their work rhythm, Joseph and Will are scanning away, Hanu and his team are preparing for the AUV mission and the Cambridge POP team starts taking cores to assess the salinity and structure of the ice (to get an answer to what we're dealing with).

I'm just on the gangway, heading back out onto the ice when there's a sudden shout from the look-out deck - and the peaceful, sun-kissed arctic scenery transforms into the great white hostile desert that it sometimes is: two polar bears are no 100 m away and there is no doubt they are heading straight for the yummy team of scientists hopping around on the ice. For the first time in my arctic experience there is no time to collect the equipment and leisurely stroll back to safety of the ship. Everyone is running for the gangway (apart from Will, who is running for his scanner) and no sooner is the team back on board and the pilot door shut when the mother bear is next to the (very expensive) survey station which was installed on the peak of the berg. To all our regrets the safety guard has to shoot a couple of banger warning shots into the air and the mother and her cub get a bit scared after all and run off - although, I should add, not in panic but more like a casual jog, resembling a shrug and a slight shake of the furry head: 'shame they are so noisy, they surely smell delicious'.

Anyway, we finished the potentially first ever 3d scan of a stamukha from both top and bottom at 3am in the morning - still in glaring sunlight -  and have set sail again to find the next piece of exciting frozenness and whatever other surprises the arctic is holding in store for us.