Rotterdam (or Anywhere)

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.

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~

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…