Hi again!
The expedition is coming to its end. We are in the Kara Sea as I’m writing this. The sea looks surprisingly empty. I had hoped for shoals of whales and flocks of birds. In reality I briefly glimpsed only one whale. As for the birds… well, it wasn’t so frustrating. I’m a passionate bird-watcher and I added some species to my “virtual collection,” including Glaucous and Sabine’s gulls, as well as short-tailed, long-tailed, and pomarine skuas. There were also some plovers, but I couldn’t recognize them even when one of them visited our helideck one night (and I mean real, astronomic night – it was dark this night).
Speaking about nights and days, the ship time is very confusing. Prof. Ronen Plesser in one of his lectures on astronomy said: “Should you ever see a full moon at noon, something has gone terribly wrong.” I couldn’t help remembering that sentence over and over, when I saw “sunset” at 10 a.m. and “sunrise” at 9 p.m.
One way or another, there is only one day of the trip left, as I write this. Everyone is giving presentations on what they’ve done during that month. Can’t wait!
Cheers from the Arctic,
– Anna Nesterovich
Hi Lindsay, it’s Chris again from LEOMHS. I was wondering, do you have any heat insulators inside the ship to keep yourselves warm?
Hi Chris, actually the inside of the ship is very comfortable and heated, and actually, it’s kind of funny that I brought a lot of cold weather gear to be outside in the cold, but not enough “regular clothes” to wear inside!
When the professor said about the moon what did he mean by “something has gone terribly wrong”. Can it be something catastrophic?
Dear Bryan, Anna (the scientist who quoted that saying) was not referring to anything catastrophic. She was only meaning that it was odd that being in the Arctic during summertime, it was daylight all the time. So it just felt odd that the Sun never actually set the whole time! (Which is because of the angle of the Earth relative to the Sun – the northern hemisphere is more angled toward the Sun than the southern hemisphere at this time of year.)
What kind of bird do you consider your favorite and what do u think that the bird you picked is very interesting?
Hi Bryan, there is a bird called the Arctic tern, which I think is so cool because it has the longest migration path of any animal. It goes between Greenland and Antarctica every year!