Busy
I’ve been working very hard CTD’ing. Not much exciting to report though – just been stuck on the ship really. Here are some quick pics from yesterday!
Polar bear
“Good morning good morning, it’s 7:20 and there is a polar bear outside your door!”
The wake up announcement was 10 minutes early so that we had time to go and have a look at him before breakfast. Very well organised this ship :-). The bear was about 20 meters away, from the ship, so I could just take the photo from starboard corner of the stern. After wandering around for a bit and sniffing all the instruments it turned round, did a crap and wandered off. I guess he didn’t think too much of us!
We’re on the move again this evening. I haven’t seen much outside as I’ve just finished up a long session in the salt mine (lab), but I felt the engines rumble into action a while ago.
There’s just been an intriguing announcement: “There will be a social event in the officers lounge at 21:15, everybody’s invited. Bring your luck and good charm and it will be an experience…” Guess I’ll find out in a bit!
More Helicopter Adventures
Here’s another batch of photos of our helicopter exploits. We’re doing much the same kind of thing every day – still every landing site is different! Unlike doing CTDs from a ship.
It was a couple of degrees cooler today and a little bit more windy too, which made it feel a lot cooler. I am using bare hands when collecting water samples to try to avoid contaminating them, so they get pretty cold if it’s windy – have to be very careful to keep my gloves dry too. I have 3 pairs though and just move on to the next ones when one pair gets damp. We were collecting samples for the biologists today too, better not to get too much fluff from our gloves in those – takes them ages to work out what it is under the microscope 😉
The photo below shows some cloud/fog over open leads in the ice. Heat flux in action! The ice insulates the warm ocean from the atmosphere, but where there are leads and the sea water is exposed it steams in huge clouds. If there is no wind, it’s incredible, the clouds are almost frightening, they are so black and have almost vertical sides around the edges of the leads – don’t really have a good photo of that yet.
When we got back to the ship today we found that the big (1km by 1km) multi-year ice floe it was moored to had broken in two. Not very good news for the sea ice scientists who want to study it! Tonight we’re on the move again looking for another big one that will be tough enough to last a few days while it is studied. ie: lots of breaking through really thick ice.
Right, well I should probably either do some more data processing or sleep. Or possibly eat waffles. There’s a waffle-iron and a big pot of batter put out in the mess every Wednesday night – nice idea eh? I didn’t have any last week, so I might go and make up for it tonight!