Operation Eisberg & Opération Iceberg

ARTE recently aired slightly cut versions of Operation Iceberg on French and German TV.
These version are now available on youtube here (Une longue odyssée vers la mort) and here (Tod eines Giganten).

the other end of the world

Just to give a quick update:

I (Till) have moved to San Diego, CA to work as a postdoc at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in an office with ocean view (so I've finally made it). My advisor here is Prof. Ian Eisenman and we'll be working on the question of whether the Arctic climate is stable or whether we are running the risk of suddenly losing all the sea ice that is left? For now this will be done from the safe confines of our offices, so I don't know when I'll be posting exciting stuff about Arctic adventures again.

I also have a new website: www.tillwagner.com  where you can find more about my work and research  etc. if you're interested.

t

Operation Iceberg has been aired. And (in all modesty) I think it's a great program. The producers managed to get just the right balance between entertainment and scientific content. It's on iplayer for a bit more and it'll be shown again on BBC 2 on Sunday Nov 11 and Nov 18.
Here's the link to the website (with lots of clips and features): www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00tvcnx and here for the iplayer www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01nqc90/Operation_Iceberg_Life_and_Death_of_a_Berg/

Enjoy!

t

No More Ice?

Big report on no arctic sea ice on Newsnight last night. Really good piece featuring an interview with Prof Peter Wadhams -- and me hopping around on an iceberg.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19496674

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mmx7q  (from 35:30)

The report was followed by a discussion with a badly misinformed (and rather agressive) conservative MP. He kept (somewhat hilariously) referring to the IPCC report as reliably scientific in contrast to the 'alarmist' views held by PW.

Somebody should have told him that PW was one of the authors on the IPCC...

Fast Forward (The End (again (for now)))

I do apologize for the rapid decrease in online activity over the last 2 weeks. There was a number of factors that contributed to my premature blogging-demise - the main one was definitely the lack of internet over the last week on the MV Neptune. We then had a horrendous journey back home, with what's probably the worst flight time to waiting time ratio ever (6h:21h), and it took me a good few days to settle back in.

And then I also didn't want to take all the excitement away from Operation Iceberg (I also had the impression that the makers of the show would appreciate if I didn't shout out all our incredible adventures into the bloggosphere before they've shown their film).

But if you're really keen to know how the story went on (and don't want to wait until mid-September when the show is aired on BBC 2), then I'd be very excited to receive your emails, or give me a call (my details can be found on my website, click here) - or leave a comment and I promise I'll answer any questions in full detail.

One thing that I will give away though is that we managed to record (for the first time) the breakup of an iceberg. I think that's pretty cool.

Thanks for all your help and support and messages. I'll post some more photos and the time and date of the airing of the show asap.

See you all (be)for the next trip!
Till

Just as a quick update, all is good on the MV Neptune, we're all safe and healthy.

The last few days have been incredible - adventure and adrenaline fantastico - and we have some great data. Finally.

I hope to have some time tomorrow for a proper post and leave you with a teaser photo:

Iceberg ahead! And yet again: Bears

I have seen large tabular icebergs before, but this morning's sight was spectacular. The berg emerged from the fog, towering over the ship, extending beyond the horizons - and anxious excitement spread instantly around deck. It is clear that most people desperately just want to get onto the ice. At the same time the signs of advanced decay of the berg are hard to miss - it is surrounded by ice ranging from slush to grand pianos to several football fields in size, all pieces that have recently broken off its edge - and it is simply impossible to tell which part will go next. There are waterfalls of meltwater thundering down its face, a face that rises up to 20m at points. Who would voluntarily want to spend a night on an island that is literally rotting beneath your feet? (i do, oh yeah!)

Oh yes! and I was the first one to touch the iceberg with my fingertips when the captain put the bow of the ship briefly against the berg's face.

And then even the most experienced polar explorers* were proven wrong - not just a little, but altogether wrong: they had pretty confidently announced that there would be no bears around the berg - or maybe a lost lonely one somewhere. By early afternoon we had seen 8! - sleeping on the berg edge, bathing in the water, strolling alongside us. Small bears, big bears - bears everywhere!

It really looks like this slab of ice might make for some pretty exciting TV.


We're planning on going ashore tomorrow morning** - and the anxious excitement on the ship is greater than at the start of the day.
 
*We have some of the most experienced polar scientists and travellers in the world on board: Doug Allan (look him up!) has spent over 8 years in Antarctica and won lots of BAFTAs and Emmys for his films. Peter Wadhams is on his 44th Arctic Cruise (or thereabouts), etc.

**By 'we' I mean the extreme climber and diver Andy Torbent with his team - to secure a safe landing site.
 

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.

On and Away

(by till)

An abandoned Russian mining settlement presented a great backdrop for the grounded Polargirl. A handful of Norwegian inflatables were circling the stranded cruise ship whilst a tiny coastguard vessel was pulling valiantly at its bow when we arrived at the scene. We attached a line to Polargirl's backside and the Arctic Sunrise pulled forcefully for about 10 minutes - then the grounded ship slipped backwards into freedom, an audible sigh of relief all round and thankful Norwegian sailors waved us goodbye. We've set sail again and are now heading north - first destination:  79. 32' N, 0. 40' E. This might be the last internet for a few days (and quite honestly, I'm not completely unhappy about that). So I leave you with a few impressions from the ship's hold:

bare science in the hold

Will Trossell and the Arctic Sunrise's Indian Emblem

the filmmaker Stephen Nugent

SOS on the radio

An hour ago everyone was happily plodding along, the AUV, or robot, or fish as the crew like to call it was hanging over the side of the ship, working her way through her standard warm-up exercises when the radio sprung to life: a small local cruise ship was calling for help - it had run aground 10 miles south of Longyearbyen and the Arctic Sunrise, being an (almost) mighty icebreaker turns out to be the strongest ship in the area. So the engines were rapidly fired up, the anchors pulled in and right now we're on our way to hopefully save the `Polargirl' (no panic though, apparently all passengers are safe and sound). That's all we know for now, internet might go any second so I'll just quickly post this. Do not worry though, because Captain Haddock has taken over the helm:

Heading North Again

(by till)

Hello everyone. We're going back North. And this time we've got some exciting plans. Having shown last year that you can get amazing scans of the top surface of the ice using ScanLAB's scanning expertise, we're joined this year by the world leader in Polar AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) operations, Hanu Singh and his team from Woods Hole. They will put their vehicle under the ice to sonar scan the underside, complementing the laser scanned top and create a perfect 3d virtual replica of the ice floes that we're studying.

We'll try and update this blog (semi-regularly) over the next couple of weeks.
After that, Prof Peter Wadhams and I will join the BBC for Operation Iceberg in Baffin Bay (West Greenland), but more on that later.

Anyway - welcome back and I hope you'll enjoy following us around the great white North the next few weeks. To give you a flavour of what we do, here is a ScanLAB scan of the ARCTIC SUNRISE (this picture actually appeared in the June edition of Wired magazine - see also http://www.scanlabprojects.co.uk/)

4 french shorts on ARTE

(by till)
I found these 4 great videos which were aired on ARTE in October, covering all aspects of the cruise in a fun way:

Preparations:

http://global.arte.tv/fr/2011/10/24/operation-calotte-glaciaire-les-preparatifs/

Life on Board:

http://global.arte.tv/fr/2011/10/25/operation-calotte-glaciere-2-la-vie-a-bord/

First Measurements:


http://global.arte.tv/fr/2011/10/26/operation-calotte-glaciaire-3-premieres-mesures/

Asking Tricky Questions:


http://global.arte.tv/fr/2011/10/27/operation-calotte-glaciaire-4-forages-et-mesures-de-la-banquise/

about Time

(by till)
Back to work in Cambridge now, we'll hopefully be able to link you to some new exciting scan animations soon. But for the Time being, I just found this great article:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2095114,00.html
(Time Magazine, 27/09/2011)

the end (for now)

(by till)

Arctic Sunrise just off Pyramiden, Svalbard (photo: Nugent)

after a long journey and a number of incredibly expensive meals in longyearbyen, tromso, oslo, we've made it back, safe and sound. And for once the sun is shining in Cambridge, so that's good.
It's been an incredible journey and we would like to thank everyone who helped us along the way, there was so much support from all sides, thank you!

Here's a couple more links:

There was a second feature in the Sun, the day after they had the 'where ice comes to die' story, this time a more cuddly polar bear story:

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3823554/Cold-play.html

For our german audience a piece by Greenpeace Germany

http://www.greenpeace.de/themen/meere/nachrichten/artikel/sommereis_im_arktischen_ozean_erneut_auf_tiefstand/

And an interview with me on the Australian breakfast radio:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/breakfast/stories/2011/3312735.htm

Nick Cobbing was our onboard photographer, and his website is absolutely brilliant, full of the most beautiful photographs, and hopefully there will also be a story on our expedition up there soon:

http://www.nickcobbing.co.uk/

And finally one more picture of our ship: