Author: lindsay

Hello!

Well…our journey is trailing off toward the end. We have just a couple days left, so I think we should take maximum advantage of our final impressions. Our meteorological group has finished cloud observations (which we did both night and day), so we are really happy that we can sleep in! But thanks to our teacher, I have started to pay more attention to the sky now. Even when I watch a movie or see a picture with a beautiful landscape, the first thing I do is try to guess what types of clouds are in the sky. Stratocumulus! Altostratus! I think it is a great experiment that will last all my life.

In conclusion I want to say many thanks to all the people who gave me an opportunity to participate in this expedition. I love it! I have learned a lot of new things. I will miss all these good people, we really have stuck together. Thank you!

 To all my Russian family and friends,

Передаю большой привет всем моим родным и близким! Желаю ТьМе, побольше вдохновения, народ, я по вам по всем очень соскучилась! Очень хочу поздравить мою дорогую мамуленьку с днем рождения! Пожелать ей побольше светлых деньков. Мам, никогда не унывай, помни, что мы тебя очень сильно любим и всегда сделаем все, чтобы ты была счастлива. Еще, что немало важно, крепких тебе нервов и долгих лет жизниJ

 People, don’t be scared to dream. If you really want something you should definitely get it.

 – Svetlana Lisova

What happens when you send a Styrofoam cup WAY down into the ocean? When it comes back, does it look different? Why? This is the classic science experiment you can do at sea (when you have access to the really deep water, and the really long cables). You have heard us talk about the CTD onboard our ship, which we have sent down dozens of time to take measurements and samples of the water, at all different depths, and all along our route. So let me tell you again what CTD stands for – conductivity, temperature, depth. And let’s concentrate on the “D” in CTD. Depth in water really means pressure. As you go down further into the water, you have the weight and pressure of all that water around you. The deeper you go, the higher the pressure. We decided to run this experiment, and see first-hand what happens when a Styrofoam cup feels that pressure. Although we didn’t have actual Styrofoam cups for everyone, we improvised by dividing some Styrofoam containers we had onboard (like the kind you get when you order take-out food). Styrofoam is an ideal material for this kind of experiment, because of its low density and, by definition, “foamy” and easily-compressed structure. Each of us designed our own piece and it was sent down in a mesh bag along with the CTD – 600meters deep. Here’s how it all “went down” (or not quite)…

Here are Svetlana and Ekaterina, designing their Styrofoam pieces.

The “before” picture of some of our pieces (There is a red marker in the photo for scale): If you look closely you can see that I did one for me and another in honor of our new Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science, currently being built in downtown Miami!

The CTD helps us do our experiment – all the way to 600meters (about 0.4miles) deep (this was the deepest CTD cast that we had left to do at the time).

Here I am bringing back the results of the experiment – almost like bringing back a sunken treasure!

The moment of truth: Antoine and Ioana check the pieces, to discover that it is not quite the results that we had hoped for…

Here’s the “after” picture (with the same red marker, for scale): you can see that even the pressure at a depth of 600meters couldn’t compress our pieces into miniature Styrofoam pieces (You can see a very small change, which we pretty much expected, but we were still hoping to see a little more…)

For comparison, Florence, one of the students in the Summer School onboard showed us what happened on a previous expedition in which she participated. In the photo below, taken by a colleague of Florence’s on that expedition, you can see an ordinary Styrofoam cup on the right. On the left is an ordinary Styrofoam cup – that has been placed on a CTD and sent down more than 2000meters (1.3miles). That’s some water pressure!

And once again, hello! As I am writing this, it is the 19th of September. In a couple of days our cruise will be over, and we will get to Kirkenes, and it will become much easier to call my friends or to send somebody e-mails! But now I have 3 more days on board. It means that I have enough time to do something I’ve never planned to do here! Well, as I wrote in my previous post, my name is Lena (it’s an unofficial form of my name), I’m a summer school student here and today is my second time to write a post in this nice blog! 🙂 Well, Lindsay asked us to write about anything we want. I think it’ll not be so interesting for you to read one more post about our project because I’m sure one of the girls has already written about it. So I decided to write about some special experiences I had on board during the last month.

First, every day, every hour, of this cruise, my project partners and I observed the clouds. We did it by going on the top deck of the vessel and noting our observations in a table. So now I will be able to wake up at 4 or 6am and go upstairs to the 5th or 6th floor and write down my observation. And of course I’ll never be confused again by stratocumulus and stratus clouds! And one more fact: there are not many sunny days in Arctic! Actually we had only a couple sunny days during the cruise, and we had fog, drizzle and cloudy weather conditions the rest of the time.

Second, we had some heavy weather days, so now I know that in stormy weather, the best two skills you can have are to scotch tape everything down in your room, and to fall asleep as quickly as you can! Otherwise all your stuff that was on the table or in drawers and wardrobes will fall in the middle of the night and wake you up!

Third, it’s really not so easy to sleep during the polar day, because it’s light all the time. That’s why you can’t keep track of the time and never know whether it is day or night. You just start to live according to the schedule. “It’s 9o’clock, it’s time to wake up!” OR “It’s 1am already! Oh my gosh! It’s time to sleep!”

And you have to put on a lot of clothes not to become frozen. So every time you go outside, it takes about 5 – 10 min to put on everything you need. So there are a lot of special features and crazy properties here! And at the same time, you get very cool experiences, and get in touch with real Arctic nature, with sweet white polar bears, insolent sea gulls, and cozy cloudy weather!

And just like the last time, I included some photos of a sunny day in the Arctic Ocean for you. And there’s me too. 🙂

– Elena Khavina

We have had a few birthdays while on this ship (including mine), but we also recently had a birthday back home, and I wanted to say happy birthday from the Arctic to my mom, who, as my brothers and I have always discussed, is the best mom ever! (And a P.S. to the best dad, brothers, family and friends ever, even if it’s not your birthdays…)

Fingers crossed that it stays that way. In the meantime, we are steaming back toward Norway, and will be back at port in a couple days, and I’ll write more soon, and respond to all of your most recent comments! (And explain the technical difficulties too.)

Well, what I have been worried about happening has now happened – technical dificulties! I can feel how remote our location really is. And it’s funny because I was just about to write a post explaining to all of you just how I have been able to get these stories and pictures sent out to you on the blog, Twitter, and Instagram, when I have pretty much zero internet/mobile access. Because it is quite the behind-the-scenes process to make it work! So I can’t send the stories or photos yet today, or answer your most recent questions and comments. This short post was all I was able to get through. But hopefully I’ll be back “online” soon!

The ocean is big. We are small. These statements are obvious. But just how big, and how small? Numbers and estimates only take your brain so far, and then you have to start using analogies. Here’s one: the Mariana Trench, the deepest trench of the ocean (11km or 6.9miles deep) goes further “down” than Mount Everest (8.8km  or 5.5miles high) goes “up.” Here’s another one: less people have been to the deepest parts of the ocean than have been to the Moon! By the time this expedition is over, scientists will have done over 120 CTD casts. (CTD, if you remember, stands for conductivity, temperature, depth, and is lowered, or “cast,” into the ocean with a slew of instruments that allow scientists to get data on the salinity, temperature, chemical composition, currents, etc, of the water.) You can see on the board in the ship’s hydrochemistry lab that the upcoming series of CTD casts start at 1100meters deep, and that each station gets more and more shallow. This transect, or line of stations, will provide data for the water moving through this area. And earlier in the expedition, we deployed a glider. Gliders move through the water, guided by periodic remote instructions from scientists onshore.

All of these things tell us about the ocean, and yesterday we learned from Ilona Goszczko of the Institute of Oceanology of the Polish Academy of Sciences about the “sea” of Argo floats (named after the ancient Greek ship) that are monitoring the world’s oceans as we speak. There are several kinds – if you want to know what is in the water, there are “BioGeoChem” floats. If you want to know about deep (I mean, DEEP) ocean waters, the APEX-Deep can go 6km (3.8miles) down. APEX-Electromagnetic can tell you about the motion of the ocean’s layers. And if you have something else you want to study, engineers can add sensors of your choice! To date, there are more than 4,500 floats deployed and over 1million profiles done of the oceans worldwide. However, although floats have been deployed in the periphery of the Arctic Ocean, they cannot be placed in the interior of the Arctic, because the sea ice would limit satellite communication and potentially damage the floats.

Now let’s get back to scale. This map looks like we have the oceans covered – but think about this. Imagine placing a grid over the Earth, with gridlines marking off increments of 3 degrees (1degree is 60nautical miles). The goal has been to deploy 1 float at every point on that grid, which means that even with 4500 buoys, each begin their journey separated by roughly 200miles in any direction!

Argo Float Maps

Argo Information Centre

 

 

Today marks the fourth week since the IARC summer school boarded the Akademik Fedorov in Kirkenes.  I was initially worried about leaving responsibilities at the university, at home preparing for winter, and also my family, for almost five weeks as a participate in this school/expedition, but the weeks have gone by very quickly.   The WRF/NEMO computer modeling project group has been busy wrapping up their final model runs of the 2012 Arctic Cyclone. For my part, I have been looking at how the modeled cyclone affects the sea-ice, when used as an input to a different model.  This may allow us to say something about the cyclone’s effect on sea-ice, using the model results as a proxy for the actual cyclone’s effect on real sea-ice.

 Perhaps more importantly than anything else I’ve learned during the cruise, as a life skill rather than scientific content, is the value of communication and teamwork.  I typically work individually or closely with my advisor, and haven’t had the opportunity to work in a larger cooperative setting as we have in Volodya’s WRF project group.  During the first few meetings, all of our group members seemed to speak at once, voicing our opinions and disagreements as we tried to make decisions.  The sessions were chaotic and somehow each of us knew what we should be doing next.  As the Friday deadline for our presentation approaches, these meetings have become much more coherent.  We all know our roles in the team and understand how our individual contributions contribute to the larger goal. Further, my part of the project relies on input produced by four other group members. This is a lot different than the go-it-alone approach I usually have.  During the cruise, as part of the project, I have run models for approximately 200 cpu-hours (i.e., the amount of time spent running the model with a single computer processor, usually while I’m sleeping), and only about 15 cpu-hours of the models were actually useful to the group.  It seems like a lot of unnecessary work, but I learned a great deal about two models, and teamwork in the process.

 Shout-outs to Julia and Doug on their birthdays!

 – j. Stroh

We celebrated another birthday on the ship! Alexey is one of our scientists on the meteorology team. He works with the team doing atmospheric observations, and is also responsible for monitoring the ocean swells during the expedition. A blush-inducing round of a happy birthday song at dinner was followed by delicious cake, and I wanted to say happy birthday again, or день рождения, to Alexey!

 

My last lecture was on satellite observations of oceanic eddies. Eddies are regions of rotating water, surrounded by non-rotating water. Eddies of different spatial scales evolve into the movement of great amounts of water, and therefore play an important role in the redistribution of pollutants and the delivery of nutrients for phytoplankton.

First we looked through some satellite imagery showing various manifestations of eddies. In thermal imagery, eddies can be seen due to differences in sea surface temperature between the inside and outside of the eddies. In visible imagery, eddies are visualized by suspended particles in the water, which serve as passive tracers of their formation. In radar imagery, it is either surfactant films or enhanced signal backscattering on shear currents which make eddies visible.

 Then, general ideas of eddy generation were discussed. Eddies can appear either due to velocity and density gradients in the water (in the photo I am demonstrating a gradient with my arms) or by applying a direct action. Among the most important physical reasons of eddy formation are friction caused by a coastline, fronts (borders between waters with different characteristics), variations in the coastline and bottom topography, and obstacles (like islands).

Finally I presented some results of my own research. I have studied mesoscale eddies (with a diameter of several tens of kilometers) and submesoscale eddies (up to about 20 km) in the Baltic, Black, Caspian, Red, and Mediterranean seas. Within this study I had to visually analyze about 10,000 images of different types and I manually detected about 20,000 eddies. As a result of this hard job, for the first time the areas of the most frequent eddy observations were defined, and the statistical parameters of eddy spatial scale were retrieved.

 I think that in general the lecture was interesting. Now I can be more relaxed and spend more time enjoying the severe Arctic weather outside.

 – Svetlana Karimova