Day 27 – 2nd September

After last nights early bed everyone including myself felt fully refreshed. Most people spent the morning relaxing at PCSP, playing pool, watching TV etc or headed out for a walk. For Dave R and I the morning was spent finishing off the matlab code that I began to write at the very start of the trip.

After lunch, both the Daves, Helen, Berit and myself headed back into town but this time in a van. We posted a couple of postcards before climbing the hill directly behind the Hamlet. From here there were some stunning views of Resolute and the surrounding area. Instead of heading back down we decide to follow the ridge all the way back to PCSP. It was an awesome walk and from the top of the ridge, you could really appreciate the immense size of the place. We were also very lucky to see some sorted circles (google search them) which form only in areas of permafrost. We arrived back at PCSP just in time for dinner and without being eaten by bears!!

The evening was again spent chilling out with everyone and playing games of pool and snooker. It was a fitting end to a fantastic trip which I shall not forget for a very long time to come!

Day 26 – 1st September

Today started early than I expected with the first load of gear leaving the ship via the helicopter at around 9am. The helicopter had to be used as Resolute Bay does not have a wharf or pier for the boat to tie up to. My turn to get off soon arrived and wow did the ride make up for the slightly sad occasion of leaving the boat. Although it only took around 1 minute to fly from the ship to the shore, the ride was incredible. The views of Resolute Bay and the ship from the air were stunning and I would have loved it to go on for longer. No wonder those that got to fly during the cruise always came back full of it!

Resolute Bay is certainly an interesting place. From what I can understand it serves no other purpose than being a Canadian presence in the north as well as a staging post for a fair few Arctic expeditions. The landscape is understandably barren, with nothing but bare rock and mud for miles and miles around. There was not any snow on the ground which is a shame as supposedly it’s meant to make the island look stunning. We have two days in Resolute as we wait to fly out on the 3^rd. We are staying at the Polar Continental Shelf Project (PCSP) which is a very comfortable staging post for Arctic Expeditions run by the Canadian government. From leaving the boat to arriving in Resolute (a 1 minute flight as you know) made us lose an hour as the boat time was one hour ahead. This made waiting for lunch particularly hard seeing as we had missed breakfast in the morning.

After a quick check with the base manager to make sure there had been no recent bear sightings we set off for a walk from the airport where PCSP is to the hamlet. Distance are deceiving and the walk ended up being 8km. we had a quick look around the town before catching a ride back to PCSP for diner and an early bed.

Day 25 – 31st August

Today was our last day on the boat and geezs it was a busy one. Amongst many other jobs, all the scientific gear had to be packed up, the foredeck cleared off all the buoys, floats and chains left over from the moorings and the water samples from the rosette sections moved from the front to the back of the boat. The ships barge even had to be deployed to move ADCPs from the front to the back of the boat as they were too heavy and too large to be moved by hand. Seeing as Humfey and Ron were going straight from the Larsen onto another icebreaker, the Sir Wilfred Laurier quite a bit of the gear had to be separated from the rest ready to be slung over to Resolute Bay tomorrow.

Between all this, I also had to process the data from the final CTD cast and get it plotted up in ODV as well as finish writing with Dave the Matlab code I had started during the first two weeks at the IOS. In the end we got everything finished except the Matlab code which didn’t matter as it gave us something to do to pass the time in Resolute Bay.

The final evening with the crew was possibly the best evening of the entire trip. Even after the bar shut, the evening still went on with plenty of merriment and dancing before finally crawling into bed somewhat later than planned!!

Weather Stations

The problem with weather stations is that in order for them to be of any interest, you have to put them in quite inhospitable spots. This poses certain challenges for the installation team. In other words, the best place to put up a weather station would be my garage - with a nice stop for lunch halfway through - but, the best place to have a weather station collecting data would be somewhere like Cape Baird, on northern Ellesmere Island.

Nares Strait experiences frequent severe winds (occasionally, in excess of 80knots!) due to air-channeling by the high surrounding terrain. Cape Baird lies fully exposed to these winds on the tip of the Judge Daly Promontory to the west of Hall Basin at 81˚ 33’ N and 64˚ 31’ W. It’s just the nasty sort of place that’s perfect for monitoring the weather. Together with stations on Hans Island (Kennedy Channel, 80˚ 49.4’ north) and Brevoort Island (west side of Smith Sound, 78˚41’N), we hope the Cape Baird installation will allow us to gain insight into the meteorology of the 250 nautical mile strait and improve our ability to forecast weather in the area.

Foggy conditions on August 17th prevented helicopter operations and kept us from flying to Cape Baird until early evening when the wind, which had been developing since the mid-afternoon, cleared away the fog. Humfrey, David and I departed for the cape with pilot Bob Bartlett expertly flying us to shore in the gusting winds. I noted at the time that we flew oriented about 30 degrees off-heading to counter the prevailing southerly wind. The downdrafts coming off the top of the 120m-high cape were strong enough to equal the upward lift of the helicopter at full power: under neutral conditions we would have been climbing at 5m/s, as it was, we were not climbing at all- in fact we were slowly losing altitude. Undoubtedly, a lovely evening to install a weather station. We made two survey sweeps of the area to determine the best location. As we passed across the headland, we startled two large groups of Arctic hares, bright white against the brown, rocky ground.

Once we had landed and unloaded the gear (Bob kept the chopper under power to maintain stability), we had to collect rocks to hold down any equipment that weighed less than about 25kg. The solar panel, light and shaped basically like a sail, was particularly vulnerable. We later determined that the wind was gusting to up to 25m/s (90 km/hr). I found it interesting that it almost blew my toque off. I’ve never experienced conditions that could plausibly remove a snug-fitting winter cap from your head. Fortunately, the air temperature was a remarkable 6 to 7 degrees Celsius. Had it been closer to the 0-1 degree we had been having on the ship, we may have had to postpone the operation. As it was, the operating conditions were challenging but not impossible.

The first step in the installation of a weather station is to secure the tripod/mast structure. We were eager to get this step completed as the sensors would be safest attached to the mast, not pinned in boxes under rocks. The ground was rocky, but loose. David determined that while a stake was difficult to pound into the ground, it could be pulled back out with two fingers. This meant that we had to collect large rocks (30-50cm across) to hold down the tripod feet and guy-wire anchors.

Once the tripod was up, we attached the anemometer (wind-speed and direction sensor), the temperature/relative humidity probe, the pyranometer and net radiometer (solar radiation sensors) and the control box. The latter contains a barometric pressure sensor and the simple computer that polls the sensors and stores the data. Finally, we attached the Iridium antenna, the solar panel and the batteries before wiring the sensors, minimizing the exposed wiring, and activating the data-logger. It has been determined that these stations are somewhat attractive to polar bears. At the Pim Island station in Smith Sound, the aluminum bracket holding the temperature/humidity sensor was bent over 90 degrees, and the solar panel bent and scratched – presumably by a bear taking exception to the station. We hope that by pulling any excess wire inside the box and strapping the exposed wires tightly to the mast we can lessen the likelihood that a bear will find some dangling bit of electronics amusing.

Final operations before being retrieved by the helicopter were to power-up the data-logger, format the memory card, monitor the sensor data and wait until the hour mark to watch for successful operation of the Iridium transmission. This station is outfitted with a modem that allows the software to transmit data, once an hour, to an Iridium satellite. A service provider receives that transmission and sends the data directly to my inbox at the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, BC, Canada. This way, we collect the data without having to return to the station to download the data, an operation that is never guaranteed because of the uncertainty of ice conditions. In many years, it is too difficult to get within helicopter range of the station because of heavy multi-year ice in Hall Basin.

Content with the mechanical strength of the station and happy to get out of the wind, we returned to the Larsen leaving the weather station to collect and transmit data, we hope, through the next two years. It was steady enough to handle 40 knot winds. Can it survive 80 knots and a bear attack?

Dave Riedel

Day 24 – 30th August

I am writing the last two days after having slept for only 5 hours after a 24 hour shift. Sorry if they make no sense!

So in the end the CTD section turned out to be longer than we expected and we didn’t finally crawl into bed till 8.45am. Pretty much a 24 hour shift! I woke up again at 2.30 pm and spent a somewhat jaded afternoon processing the new CTD data and running a few calibration checks between the three different CTDs that have been used this trip. As a lot of the sections have data from more than one CTD we needed to be sure that they were recording the same values. If one CTD was always over estimating a parameter it would have to be taken into account when the data is finally processed back at the labs.

Whilst we were sleeping, the rest of the team deployed a new mooring containing both an ADCP and ice profiling sonar. They then began to pack up and clear everything off the decks back into the two shipping containers that we brought on board as the electronics lab and mooring construction workshop/CTD operation lab.

After a few drinks in the bar, most people got an early bed ready for the busy day of packing tomorrow as we depart the ship on the first.

Day 22 and 23, 28th and 29th August.

As we spent most of these two days cruising, I have grouped them into one post as to be honest very little happened except working, relaxing and of course sleeping, until the evening of the 29th when we had a Lu’au (a Hawaiian party) and the Screeching in ceremony followed by a 7 hour CTD section.

For the Lu’au, which seems to be a traditional event on the Larsen, the crews lounge was incredibly well decorated. There was a volcano, numerous palm trees, the bar had been renamed and there were flowers and fish all over the walls. Fortunately, I had brought with me a pair of board shorts and fairly Hawaiian looking shirt so didn’t look too out of place. To add to the outfit, I also made from foam a half size ish surfboard. I must admit it looked pretty awesome and it went down really well with everyone. I have no idea what to do with it now, so may well leave it on the Larsen and add it to the decoration pool. Other scientist and crew had made grass skirts from duck tape and Kevlar rope, flower necklaces and many other difference bits of Hawaiian tat.

The Screeching in was quite an experience for the eight of us who had to go through it. We firstly were fed some steak and brewis (hard dog biscuit) before having to sit one at a time in a dinghy called ‘me punt’ that the crew had made especially for screeching in. We then had to repeat Newfoundland sayings as fast as we could without getting them wrong. Of course if you got them wrong you had to have a shot of screech. I think it took me at last three tries to get it write. However it wasn’t over once you got it right. To finish the initiation you had to kiss ‘Rufus’ the salted cod. Unfortunately I was last and by this time the kiss had turned into a full face smothering which wasn’t particularly nice. It was such a laugh and after washing my face all was good again.

But, as I mentioned earlier we couldn’t party all night as at 1.30am we arrived on station for the final CTD/Rosette section of the trip. It was by no means a small one and its nine stations would take us over 7 hours to complete. So off came the outfits and on went the Arctic floater suits before we headed out into the dusk on the foredeck. Shockingly the sun had set and for the first time this trip we had to work under the floodlights!!

Day 21 – 27th August

Today we cruised north from the mooring line in Norwegian Bay where we spent the day drifting with the ice. The day was dominated by the ice work and very little, if not none, ocean work got done. Justin and Ben made a couple of flights with their bird whilst Michelle, Carl and Richard spent the whole day out on the floes. They deployed their second thermistor chain which they were all quite pleased about.

After yesterday’s mishap with the data and ODV, I spent the majority of the day uploading the remaining 25% of the data, whilst making copious backup copies!! Otherwise the rest of the day was spent analysing more of the CTD data and writing a couple of new matlab programs for different things.

As today was Thursday it was also the weekly Larsen BBQ your own steak night. Come dinner time, you head out onto the deck were you can pick out of the meat vat and cook, the largest piece of steak you have even seen. Of course it is the Larsen so if you are feeling extra peckish you can also cook yourself a pork chop! BBQing in minus temperatures with sea ice and glaciers streaming past in the background is a very surreal experience. However one definitely not to be missed!

After the ice teams returned to the boat, the plan was to loop round the north of Devon Island into Penny Strait to pick up the next mooring 50 miles away. However the ice was far too thick for the boat to even consider breaking through so we had to turn around. What had been a 50 mile cruise promptly turned into a 600 mile 2.5 day cruise back into Jones Sound to Baffin Bay were we headed south and west into Lancaster Sound before turning north again at the south west tip of Devon Island back into the other end Penny Strait. It’s kinda hard to explain so have a look at the ships track on the website I linked to in the ‘Precursor to the Arctic’ Post.

Day 20 – 26th August

Well after a lot of hard work we successfully re-deployed the three moorings we recovered yesterday. It was not easy and both Humfrey and Joe were up to the early hours of the morning working to upload new software and construct the new anchors. Analysis of the data recovered from the last two years showed that the strong currents in the strait had shifted the orientation of the ADCPs at some point during their deployment. As I have mentioned before, this is not a problem in the low latitudes as a flux gate compass is installed with the ADCP to help correct the change. However up here, where the magnetic north pole is only a stones throw to the NE of us, the earths magnetic field is pretty much perpendicular rather than parallel to the earths surface, making flux gate compasses pretty much useless. This means any shift in the ADCPs orientation during the deployment makes the data analysis more complicated. Because of this the new anchors were particularly chunky, weighing in at 2700 lbs – that’s just over a metric ton!

Unfortunately we had no further luck with the lost mooring today. It appeared that what we thought was the lost mooring talking yesterday was in fact interference from one of the other acoustic releases. I spent quite a time in the morning, with Ron and Humfrey repeatedly pinging/ranging the releases as we drifted with the tide, but we heard nothing back. This is not surprising as during the four years the releases could easily have run out of battery, been damaged and leaked water or simply moved out of range of our transponder by the current.

I also unfortunately had a massive problem with the data I had analysed and loaded into ODV. Somehow as I tried to delete a single station that had some errors in it, I either clicked the wrong button or ODV decided that it would actually delete the whole collection without asking me if I was sure. Now this shouldn’t be a problem as of course any sensible person would have a backup copy. However, for some reason even unbeknown to me, I did not have a back up copy, so was left with the prospect of having to do it all again – I would guess at about a days solid work. Fortunately, the ships electronics officer managed to find a data recovery utility which was able to get back about 75% of the data. Phew!! I got away with it this time, but I have certainly learnt my lesson.

Day 19 - 25th August

We arrived at the Cardigan Strait mooring line at around 10-11 am. We are slightly pressured for time due the ice delaying us earlier in the trip, so we set about to work as fast as we could. The critical task for today was to recover the three ADCP moorings left here in 2007 and possibly see if we could locate and release a further mooring that has been lost for four years. The three moorings from 2007 were located very rapidly and each one, carrying on the trend of the cruise, popped up with no problems at all. Due to strong currents in the strait, the floats used on the moorings were much larger than those used in Nares Strait as it helps to keep the instruments vertical. Because of this they were particularly impressive when they popped up as the extra buoyancy made the whole mooring leap onto the surface with quite a splash!

The plan is to turn all the moorings round overnight so they can be redeployed tomorrow. Not an easy feat! The result was that the foredeck was a hive of activity with numerous computers downloading and analysing the last two years of data whilst Joe, Ron and Dave got to work methodically removing all refurbishing all the battery cases, acoustic releases and constructing new anchors from old railway wheels and chains.

Much to our surprise as well, it appeared that the lost mooring was actually talking to us. This bode well and we decided to leave releasing it till tomorrow as we instead headed slightly south down the strait to complete another combined CTD/water sample section. Having planned for this to happen in the evening, many people for caught out with no diner when we arrived on station at 17:00. Seeing as we are use to eating at Larsen times we were all rather hungry when the section was finally completed at 19:38.

In the evening I played my first game of the darts competition with my team mate Richard who is one of the ice guys. We had been given a bye into the second round due to un-even teams and we were hoping to progress even further. However neither of us were shooting particularly well and we were beaten in the end 2-nil by Darlene (a deck hand) and Mike (chief engineer). It was a good laugh though and at times quite a close match. After the Ironman competition yesterday, we were all pretty jaded so most of us took an early night ready for another day in the Arctic.

Day 18 - 24th August

Today could possibly be one of the best days of my life! Firstly the news filtered through to me that England had regained the ashes. It sounds like the last two tests were pretty awesome so if anyone has a copy of them would you be able to save it for me? Cheers for keeping me updated. It was kinda hard to share the success as most people on the boat don’t really know what cricket is all about and almost no one had even heard of the ashes, except of course Helen who is from Oxford University.

The second thing that happened, and probably the most incredible, is that we saw a POLAR BEAR!!!!! One moment I was looking through some Matlab code and the next almost the entire crew including the scientists had appeared on the starboard side with enough cameras to be a bona fide paparazzi team. Although the bear was quite far away and therefore pictures are not amazing, it could be clearly seen with the naked eye. It was just walking across one of the nearby floes paying us absolutely no attention to us and the big red boat cruising past. It just goes to show how it knows it is the top of the food chain and therefore does not need to be afraid of anything. Further down the floe was a pile of bloody remains which I guess was the bear’s lunch!

After completing all the work up north, the boat has begun to head south again. We spent the entire day cruising down the length of Ellesmere Island before turning west into Cardigan Strait. We were cruising for the entire day so very little work got done.

In the evening the Henry Larsen ‘Ironman Competition’ took place. We were split up into teams of two and had to compete in a variety of events such as tug-of-war and hockey shooting on the helicopter deck, word unscrambling, treasure hunts and who could draw the best picture of the captain. It was a wicked night and didn’t wrap up till after one. The ships karaoke set was then brought out, so after a bit of cajoling I went ahead and embarrassed myself. It was all a good laugh though and no one really cared how bad you sounded. Phew!!

Day 17 - 23rd August

Weather Station - keep watching this space for the report!!

Photos!!

Ed, you are in luck. We have just cruised far enough south to pick up the internet so here are some of the photos I have taken. We need to head north again soon so I don't know how long we will have the internet for. Just bear with me!

Love to all.

Day 16 – 22nd August

Scroll down for days 14 and 15. Sorry for the delay in getting posts up recently. The email system up here is unsurprisingly slightly flaky at times!

Well to be honest, after the last two days of extra excitement, today returned very much to the ‘normal’, routine. After little success yesterday at getting the new moorings back into the water, they were today’s main focus of activity. We had to spend a little time waiting for the ice floes to move out the way (the wind has changed direction so the ice has begun to flow south again), but in the end we successfully managed to deploy the lot. The foredeck is now mostly clear of buoys, floats, instruments and Kevlar rope making moving around the CTD winches and rosette a lot simpler! Retrieving and deploying every mooring successfully is certainly not a usual occurrence and therefore Humfrey is a very happy chief scientist!

So far throughout the cruise I have not suffered at all from sea sickness. Now I would like to say that this is because is have some iron sea legs but that would simply be lying. The real reason is so far the strait has simply been as flat as a mill pond. We have not experienced any of the strong winds that the strait is renowned for (most likely because it is summer) and the ice does a great job of mopping up swells if they do begin to form. At some points it’s been so flat you would not have been able to tell we were on boat.

However this all changed today after the wind decided that is was going to blow for a while. Although it certainly wasn’t enough to cause people any trouble the boat certainly started to rock a little! Its effect on the temperature though was horrendous. All the scientific work is completed on the foredeck so even if there is no wind there can easily be a 7-8 knot wind created simply from the boat moving. Add to this a 20 knot wind and an ambient air temperature of -1^oC you can imagine what the wind chill does to you! Fortunately the boat is nice and toasty inside, so even if your fingers feel like they are seconds from frost bite you only need pop inside and all is well. This huge difference in temperature though does cause its own problems however if you have to pop outside occasionally for a few minutes. It’s too much of a faff to get fully dressed up in the thick floater suits just to get undressed again a few minutes later so most people just end up diving outside in sometimes just a t shirt. You have to do what ever it was you had go outside for pretty quickly or else you feel like you are freezing like an ice cube rapidly!

Day 15 – 21st August

Geeezs what a crazy night!

We left the fjord late afternoon to head back south to the new mooring line. However as we left the mouth of the fjord we cruised slap bang into the side of the biggest continuous ice floe I have ever seen. Unbeknown to us the piece of ice that had originally stopped us from entering the fjord, before moving slightly to let us in, had decided to move back to its original position whilst we were working on the glacier, blocking an easy exit! It took the entire night and until about 10am the following morning to finally break our way out. In some places the boat had back up at least 8 times before we broke through! Trying to sleep through all this was an experience. Although ear plugs pretty much kill the noise there is nothing to stop you feeling like there is a jack hammer under your bed whose sole purpose is to throw you out. Even taking a shower and drinking a glass of orange juice need you utmost attention unless you don’t mind falling over or spilling your glass everywhere!

Never minding the slight discomfort, it did provide plenty of excitement and some stunning pictures of the orange glow of the midnight sun streaming down on ice that surrounds you for as far as the eye can see. I shall definitely put the pictures up as soon as I can for you all to see.

Due to the ice delaying us, not a vast amount of work got down today with only a couple of moorings going in and a trip to the Hans Island weather station being completed. However there has been some good news. The trip mascot Hans, who as you may remember broke his legs, has made a full recovery after extensive surgery carried out by the Yvonne, the ships nurse, and five minute epoxy. His speedy recovery meant he was able to make the trip in the helicopter to Hans Island with the weather station team. Here he was fixed facing north to one the rock cairns allowing him to look over his namesake island and the Arctic until he is picked up again in a couple of years. Lets hope he survives and does not lose too much of his paint in the 40 knot winds!

Day 14 – 20th August

After cruising all through the ‘night’ the boat finally arrived in the Petermann Fjord (81^o North) early this morning and wow what and incredible place! The Fjord is surrounded on both sides by huge, towering cliffs that shoot up vertically for the waters/ice edge and reach heights of just under 1000m. The immense scale is completely un-comprehendible until you get right underneath the cliff and look up at the cliffs soaring into the sky. The fjord itself is completely dominated by the Petermann Glacier which measures 60-70 km from where it floats off the bedrock at the head of the fjord to the ice front/terminus. Unlike many other glaciers in Greenland which do not float and therefore lose the majority of their mass via calving, the Petermann Glacier loses 90% of it mass from melting as it thins from 600m at the fjord head to 50m at the ice front over a period of 50 years (the ice advances at a rate of 1200m per year).

There were three main aims of the day. These were to firstly tow a CTD along the ice front to locate and measure melt-water freshened outflows from beneath the glacier, secondly to retrieve data from times lapse cameras set up on the cliffs above the glacier by Jason Box (Ohio State University) operating from the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise and finally to take a full CTD section along the ice front.

I was very fortunate to be involved with towing the CTD along the entire length of the ice front and what a fantastic experience it was. To be so close to a glacier in the Larsen’s relatively small RIB must be a once in a lifetime experience. The team involved was myself, Helen and two of the crew called Shannon and Izzy, and we were on the water from 10.30 till 3.30. One of the CTDs had been modified and attached to a homemade fin making it look somewhat like an elongated fish. Unfortunately to make it fly level in the water we also had to attach an immense amount of weight on the front which made moving it up and down the water column a serious undertaking. It was always a sure fire method to warm you up though if you were a little cold! We settled with towing the CTD at around 1.5 – 2m below the surface and had to keep the RIBs speed pretty slow as we weaved our way in between the chunks of floating ice. The results we collected were somewhat varied. At the very beginning of the tow we noticed the ice was moving at a significant pace right where the glacier meets the base of the cliffs indicating an outflow, and here the salinities were particularly low representing a freshwater outflow. This early success got our hopes up. Unfortunately the rest of the tow did not produce such good results. We didn’t really locate any other significant fresh water outflows with the salinity only varying by one or two. In fact at one point the salinity was so constant we thought the CTD my have broken.

The job of flying in the helicopter up to the cliff tops to replace the cards in the time lapse cameras was given to Dave and Ron. The cameras are designed to photograph the possible imminent calving of a large (7 by 5.5km or larger) tabular berg from the ice shelf. The cameras themselves were located pretty close to the edge of the 900m drop so Dave and Ron had to be pretty careful working up there. The pictures they got up there were fantastic even if some of the positions they took them from must have been pretty hairy. They took quite a few aerial photos of the boat which looks the size of a toy compared to the massive ice floes dotted all over the surface.

The CTD section was completed throughout the afternoon with the deepest cast reaching down to just over 1000m. I’m glad I wasn’t operating the winch for that one! I will be processing the data in the next couple of days and it will be interesting to see what it shows.

After the long days work for most people, the evening was spent relaxing in the officer’s lounge. We had even decided that normal ice was not good enough so instead had chipped a small amount off the glacier itself to drink with our Screech (Newfoundland rum) and coke. What a way for ice that is thousands of years old to melt!

Day 13 – 19th August

So as I mentioned yesterday before running off to find out more about the satellite images, we had begun to move south again back to the section were we plan to deploy the new moorings. The new section is located slightly further north than the 2007 section (when the moorings were deployed), between Jo Island and Ellesmere Island. As with recovering the moorings, I was not particularly involved with their re deployment, so my day was pretty quiet. However the three technicians onboard, Joe, Dave and Ron have been working incredibly hard for the last few days in preparation for putting the moorings back in the water. Between them the have refurbished or rebuild all the battery case, acoustic releases, floats, frames, Kevlar mooring lines and lots more that isn’t immediately obvious. As you can imagine, a lot of care and attention to detail has to go into their work as any problem is likely to prevent the mooring from being recovered in two years time. A significant loss when each ADCP mooring is estimated to cost $150,000 Canadian dollars to get into the water!

However, as I news flashed yesterday, the mooring work was quickly put back in the queue of priorities when new satellite imagery came though showing a clean path through the ice into the Petermann Fjord. Humfrey (the chief scientist, and my supervisor) and the captain decided to turn the boat around and head back up north to complete the work we had been unable to do a few days ago. We were all pretty excited at the prospect of having to break more of the thick ice I mentioned a fews days ago and at the possibility of seeing the Petermann Fjord which according to those who have been here before, is one of the most spectacular parts of the cruise! So after completing another CTD section we all went to bed hoping the ice wouldn’t shift to much overnight stopping the ships relentless march northwards.

Day 12 – 18th August

If there has been any day on the trip so far where sods law has had its way, it had to be today! After the last few days of thick fog stopping us doing pretty much everything that requires the boat to move or the helicopter to fly, today it ‘dawned’ bright and clear. The plans were quickly decided that today we would finally get the work done on the glacier in the Petermann Fjord. The glacier is peculiar in the fact that it loses the majority of its mass through melting rather than through calving ice bergs. We hoped to locate the position of any freshwater outflows from the glacier (resulting from its melting), and whether these mapped to the locations of inverted valleys on the underside of the ice which have been indentified by glaciologists.

However, it was when the ice recon flight returned that sods law struck; the way into the Petermann Fjord had become block with ice too thick for the ship to break through! The southerly winds which had been blowing for the last few days had caused the ice to stop drifting south and instead made it drift northwards and too the right (result of Ekman transport), right into were we wanted to go! Typical!

So instead of spending the day next to a glacier, the boat turned south and started to head back down the Strait towards the transect were we plan to re-deploy all the moorings. Before leaving we completed another seven station CTD section with water samples. My fingers very quickly became blocks of ice and I was very relived when it finished and I could finally crawl into bed at 2.30am.

News Flash!! News Flash (19^th August – I am writing a day behind) – the ice conditions shown by the satellite appear to have cleared enough for us to get into the glacier – I am off to find out what’s going on!

Day 11 – 17th August

Watch this space for the Weather Station in 60 knot winds update coming in a few days!

Day 10 – 16th August

Arghhh more fog!! When is this stuff going to lift?

As you’ve probably guessed, today ‘dawned’ exactly the same as the last two: thick fog shrouding everything in site. Seeing as nothing particular interesting happened in the morning (people just mooched around working on different problems and setting up equipment for future work), I will instead tell you all a little about life on the ship.

The Larsen itself is a particularly comfortable boat which makes sense when you think about the conditions its crew have to deal with sometimes. All the cabins I have seen (I may not have seen them all!) are very comfortable and much bigger than I expected. The cabin I share with Dave is big enough for a couch, two chairs, a desk, TV, spacious bunk bed and is even en suite! We don’t spend that much time in the cabin, but its awesome to come back too after spending a long cold night working the CTD.

As I think I mentioned before, the two chefs on the Larsen, Geoff and Brad cook an incredible amount of really good food. Meal times throughout the day are at 7.30 am, 11.30am and 5.30pm. You have to pace yourself throughout the day or by the evening you can be uncomfortably full! Of course food is not only available at meal times. At any time of the day you can head to the galley and help yourself to pretty much anything, be it ice cream, cookies, cake, brownies (amazing!), toast, fruit, yogurts, muffins etc etc etc. Some of the main meals we have had include pizza, pork chops, saltfish and brewis (a Newfoundland special), pan fried halibut and loads more that I honestly can’t remember.

Sunday is a very traditional day on board. All the officers dress up in white shirts and everyone gets a glass of wine with the lunchtime roast meal (lunch is usually considered to be the main meal). As part of the science team, we have the choice to eat either in the crews’ mess or the officers mess. The food is exactly the same in both except in the crews’ mess you have to collect your own meal whilst in the officers’ mess you are waitered upon. I usually eat in the crews’ mess as there is not always space with the officers.

Well to get back to what happened today, the mist finally cleared in the late afternoon! An ice recon flight was quickly launched and after they returned with a good report, the ship headed north and we soon crossed the 81^st parallel. At one point however the ship was halted in its path by a pressure ridge stretching for miles across the ice floes. These areas are particularly thick (10m+) as they are made when two ice floes collide creating immense amounts of pressure, forcing the ice up. Too get through the boat had to, as I described yesterday, back up and crash into the ridge a fair few times before we managed to punch a hole. Some of the ice was so thick; it was pushing the boat around all over the place!

However disaster also struck. The mascot for the cruise, a garden gnome called Hans, has joined us on the foredeck for some photos. But he was not behaving himself and he decided to climb onto on of the ADCPs. He refused to hold on and unfortunately he fell off breaking both his legs and suffering significant head injuries. He was quickly put into a femoral splint before being rushed to the ships nurse. She promised to do her best to help him, and we are all hoping he will get better soon enough to visit his namesake, Hans Island, were we have to service a weather station.

Day 9 – 15th August

So the fog has decided to linger for another day again throwing the ship and the science plans into complete limbo again! I guess in the end though someone got fed up waiting as by the early morning the ship was slowly threading its way north through some of the thickest ice we have seen so far. Up until now the ice floes have been thick but not particularly consolidated with plenty of water between them through which the ship threads its way. Instead of ‘breaking’ ice we have mainly just been banging into single floes which either get pushed out the way, broken in half or sometimes if they are big enough make the whole ship bounce off to one side. Not ideal if you are on the stairs at the time!

However, today we were doing what I would call ‘real’ icebreaking. The ship was surrounded on all sides by what appeared to be a single ice floe and we were slicing are way right through the middle of it. The ice was thick multi year causing the ship to be bounced and thrown all over the place. Numerous times we came to particularly thick areas/ pressure ridges that the ship could not break through in one go. At this point the ship simply backs up, leaving a perfect ship shaped hole in the ice, before ramming the same place over and over again until we break through. The crew were telling us that at one point they were ramming the same spot for over eight hours as they tried to make a route for a fuel tanker! In the end the ship came to halt somewhere around Hans Island although we couldn’t see anything!

Similar to yesterday most people spent the day working on their own tasks. Helen and I set up a CTD so that it could be towed behind the RIB rather than lowered on the winch as one of the aims of the cruise is to get a shallow transect of water properties along the ice front of the Petermann Glacier which is still further north of us. We are hoping to find where the areas of freshwater outflow are located along the ice front which is about 15-16km in length. I will explain more about the work closer to the time. Dave was having a bit of a nightmare with the new weather station that is going to be installed on Cape Baird. After hours trying to work out why all the data coming out the machine seemed to be correct but in completely the wrong places he discovered that two of the wires had been crossed way back in the process of construction and there wasn’t anything wrong with the control code – much to his relief!

Again we had the evening off so we were able to join the crew for their bingo evening. I have never played before, but what a great bunch of people to start with. It was a laugh after a laugh after a laugh. I didn’t win at all but ah well. Dave, Justin, Natasha and myself then wipped out Wii Rockband and shredded up the crews lounge till way after midnight when we suddenly remembered that just because it’s light outside, it doesn’t mean its still early in the evening!!!

Day 8 – 14th August

Well to be honest I never made it back last night. I went to the bar as soon as the station was over! So to quickly finish of yesterday we had the evening off as there were no CTD sections to be completed. Instead we spent a good evening down in the crews’ lounge playing darts, fussball and generally getting to know the crew better. They are a fantastic bunch of people!

We woke up today to thick pea soup fog which quickly threw a spanner into all the days plans. We wanted to start heading further north but the ice reports were not good and therefore the captain didn’t want to get under way without an ice reconnaissance flight. But because the fog was so thick the helicopter couldn’t fly so we ended up just not really moving anywhere for most of the days. The two Daves had hoped to replace another weather station on Hans Island but of course couldn’t without the helicopter. In the end most people just spent the day working on their own tasks be it data download, data analysis, instrument cleaning, mooring construction etc etc.

In the end though some work was completed. The ship sailed the short distance back to the ice floe where Michelle and her crew were working yesterday so they could install their GPS tracker. They got lowered from the ship onto the ice in the man basket before soon heading off into the murk along the line they had drilled yesterday. Of course a crew member was with them with a rifle in case of a polar bear! We also got some work done in the end by completing the water sampling section I mentioned in yesterdays post. The rest of the evening was again spent chilling out with the crew but this time in the officer’s lounge. We all had to complete the Newfoundland IQ test in which everyone came to a pretty stick end…….but hopefully I think we all passed!

Day 7 – 13th August

Well as I write this, it is actually tomorrow evening and I have popped in for a quick break from a water sample and CTD section. I have just tipped a bottle of water right down my arm and into my gloves so my hands feel like they have been shoved in an ice cream tub for the last few hours. I hope some typing will warm them up!

Today has again been a fairly quiet day for me. We didn’t manage to collect all the moorings yesterday so the main part of the day was spent collecting the last few. We ended up having a 100% successful recovery rate which is incredible if you think that some of the instruments had been under the water for three years. Unfortunately as can only be expect, a handful of the instruments had malfunctioned in some way or other and didn’t have complete data sets. It’s a shame but in no way a real problem. For most of the morning and afternoon, apart from running out to see each mooring pop up, I was in the lab room continuing to process the CTD data. Whilst I was working Linda, the water sampling technician, was analysing some of the test samples we collected yesterday for dissolved oxygen. For some reason the auto analyser was playing up so she wasn’t having the best of days. Of course as it goes with technology it just started to suddenly work making her pretty pleased in the end!

The ice drilling team (Michelle, Richard and Carl) spent the day out on the ice and ended up drilling down 300m in total. They found an average thickness of 8m which is pretty thick for sea ice. I think they found such a ‘nice’ floe that they want to head back tomorrow to install a GPS tracker and thermistor chain (lots of thermometers in a line) to track and floe and its rate of melting. The guys who measure ice thickness via helicopter have not been able to get out for the last few days mainly because the ice thickness has not been worth the effort and the weather has been getting worse. The clear blue skies we have had since the beginning of the trip are slowly becoming overcast and foggy but hopefully this won’t last too long.

Ah got to head out we are on station – back in a while!