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We have done over 60 CTD casts on this expedition! It’s truly amazing. For new readers, CTD stand for conductivity, temperature, and depth, and is an instrument that we lower down into the water – way down, sometimes to a couple thousand meters – to take water samples at many different depths. And “cast” refers to the process of lowering it into the water for measurements and then bringing it back out again to get the water samples. I’ve told you about some of the activities in the hydrochemistry lab – studying the oxygen, nitrates, and salt content levels, temperatures, and phytoplankton growth in water samples taken by the CTD – and here are some of the people that make it happen!

Anna Nesterovich is measuring the silica content of water from different depths. Photo from Anna Nikulina

I initially introduced you all to Vladimir in the ship’s radio room, who helped me get my first emails and blog posts sent off the ship to you. But I have to introduce you to Oleg too. From the second or third day into the expedition, he has been the person onboard who helps me transmit all my messages out to you, every single day. And it is always with patience, a smile, and a little English practice for him and Russian practice for me! Lately, he has been giving me daily updates about a butterfly who has been hanging out in the radio room (you never know, on a ship). And for my birthday, he gave me these two hand-carved, hand-painted birds, which he made himself while onboard. They are beautiful/красивый!

Hello everyone!

I’m inspired to tell you about what NABOS summer school has given to me. It is a good place for exchanging knowledge with each other. This is a place where everyone is a student and a teacher at the same time. How does it work?

 Students do not only listen to lectures. Every student chooses a project in which they are most interested, and begin to work in a team. Our team is researching the Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL). We study clouds’ classification and then we analyze all the available data: meteorological temperature profiles of the atmosphere from the MTP-5 instrument, as well as weather profile data from balloons called radiosondes, and then we compare them with each other. Several interesting phenomena, such as temperature inversions, exist in the Arctic PBL. An inversion is when the temperature increases with height (the opposite of what we would normally expect), and we study what causes this phenomenon. Every day we investigate the latest issues that scientists in oceanographic and atmospheric physics are facing. It could be issues such as how to model different phenomena, how to take into account all the conditions that affect global process like decreasing sea ice levels, what causes changes in the Arctic… and, who knows? Probably one of these issues will be solved by one of us, or you…

 This is a picture of our PBL team. It was a fantastic 30 minutes on the real Arctic ice! We saw how measurements are taken of ice thickness, and then did it ourselves!

 With love from the most wonderful, unique Arctic!

– Ekaterina Perminova, sixth-year student of Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology State University

You can think of science as a class in school, and you can also think of science as a way of looking at the world. But you should remember that both are correct. On the ship, it’s like everyone has their own lens, and by looking through that lens, they see the world in their own way. We are all here on the same ship, looking out at the same ocean and sky, but it seems that each person has a slightly different view of it! Here is “the view” through the lenses of a couple more students, from their presentations:

Ioana (who is from Romania and lives in the US) talked about the variability and predictability of sea surface temperatures in the north Atlantic. But instead of using direct observations, she uses climate models that can help analyze the variability over multiple decades. She uses coupled climate models (“coupled” means that it includes ocean, atmosphere, ice, and land) and inputs external forcings (like greenhouses gases) and atmospheric weather noise (random unpredictable fluctuations) into the model. Her work will help to better understand hurricane activity in the Atlantic, rainfall and river flows in the continental US, and even global temperatures over multiple decades.

Eric (who is from the US) studies microscopic particles in the atmosphere called aerosols. They may be tiny, but they can have big effects on the climate system. Aerosols come from both man-made sources (ships, cars, factories), and natural sources (forest fires, sea salt sprays, dust devils), and are made of chemical types such as sulfates, nitrates, sea salt, and carbons. Aerosol particles can change how clouds scatter and absorb light from the Sun, which can even result in longer-lasting clouds. And this is just one example of how these tiny things make a big difference.

Most students don’t like chemistry and some of them simply hate this subject. But we are not schoolchildren anymore. In our expedition there are people that love their work, and in particular the Chemistry team has amazed me. The people working there do their job with vim and vigor in their eyes. They take care of constructing the diagrams on the monitors with enthusiasm, even though they have seen it 100 (or more) times before!!! The scientists in the lab joke and talk all the time. Sergey Kirillov checked off depths of the CTD (conductivity, temperature, and depth) rosette instrument very closely as it rose through the water, because they need to take water samples from fixed levels: 2200meters, 2000meters, 1500meters, 1200meters, etc. The day I visited the lab I met Ksenia Artamonova, Anastasia Drozdova and Anna Nikulina, who were very funny and benevolent. These girls like their work! My teammate (Florence), who is American, worked in such a lab before and she helped me a lot by sharing a lot of her knowledge, showing me many of the instruments, and sharing different aspects of her own work.

 Seeing them reminds me that I too like my profession very much. I realized this some years ago, when I enrolled in the geography faculty. When I enrolled in geography, I hoped that along with studying would also come a lot of beautiful and romantic traveling experiences. Many people – my parents, my friends –talked to me at that time and said to me that this feeling will pass quickly, but no, it has never passed and it will not pass! Never. Being a geography student and having the opportunity to travel and see the world made me fall in love with many of the places I saw and with this life, and now recently with the Arctic!

 – Anna Gnevasheva

It’s the first Friday of September, but the dates have become more-or-less irrelevant over the past two weeks. We began the second-half of the cruise today and I think we are all still excited to be here in the Arctic despite that feeling like “summer” again now that we’ve left the sea-ice.  I have also been able to sleep well for the past few nights without the ice scraping against the side of the ship.  The sound is truly unique and I laid in bed for several sleepless nights, searching for familiar sounds to which it compares. I decided that it combines the roar of a subway train passing 10 feet away with the slow-motion crunching of an industrial metal compactor (like a junkyard “car crusher”).  It seems so quiet now that I actually miss the sound a little!

 Despite the title of this entry, I’m a mathematician by training and have only recently begun to work in science. I only say this out of respect for my fellow students and colleagues who have always been scientists first and have an understanding of science far beyond mine. I have always been interested in science and how nature works, particularly the oceans, but chose a different path for studying the natural world. If you, the reader, have been following the blog, you’ve probably noticed that there is a lot happening on the ship. The expedition’s scientists are collecting data from every source imaginable, from clouds and sea-ice to chemical concentrations more than a mile below the ocean surface. Meanwhile, other scientists as well as the NABOS Summer School students fervently run computer simulations of real-world systems in computer models.  These two aspects of science — modeling and observation — are tied together by my discipline: data assimilation. It involves a lot of complicated math designed to adjust the computer models to more accurately reflect the data collected from the real world.  Yesterday, I had the opportunity to present an overview of the basic techniques and ideas of data assimilation to my fellow students, reciprocating the education they have given me in the past few weeks on a variety of topics like atmospheric dynamics, climatology, and movement of individual water masses.

 – j. Stroh

After updating our route, and heading through clearer waters (by clearer I mean ice-free ), we are headed back into ice! We are at 79°N latitude and 125°E longitude, and the temperatures (air and water) are around -1°C (30°F), and we are continuing back north. I love how, with all the intellect on this ship, there is an unending childlike excitement about seeing little pieces of ice turn in big floes of ice rafting over each other as we pass by. More ice = more chances to do observations of the ice + on the ice + in the ice + …

Sometimes people refer to “scientists” as if it has one definition. One of my favorite things about this cruise, and a message that I hope you have gotten by reading this blog, is that all of these scientists are so different from each other. “Unique” is one of my favorite words in the world, and I love that I can say that this cruise is full of people with unique research interests, unique personalities, and unique ways of looking at the world. So here are a few more unique presentations from our Summer School students!

Mathieu (who is from France, and lives in the US) brought more biology to the expedition, and talked about organisms called foraminifera, or foram. Benthic forams live on the seabed and have a good life, their main activities being eating, breathing, and reproducing. They don’t do photosynthesis like some of the planktonic forams that live near the surface and use the sun’s energy. They just need oxygen and organic carbon as a source of food, so if there are a lot of benthic forams, there will be less organic carbon in the sediment. This becomes important when you realize that the carbon in the sediment is connected to the amount of carbon in the ocean, which in turn is linked to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. So despite being microscopic, they can still have an effect on the entire carbon cycle.

jake (from the US) is the resident mathematician of the group, and talked about something called data assimilation. Here’s what that means. In any system (the ocean for example), you start with initial observations. Then you make a model to analyze or predict how the ocean system will evolve. But when the initial observations aren’t enough to create a clear initial picture, you can “assimilate more data” into your model, to improve its accuracy. So, models give a sense of what is happening in a system (like the ocean), data tells you what’s going on in the details, and data assimilation helps you make it better.

Today it’s my turn to write something in the blog, but I have no idea how to start my post. Well my name is Lena and I’m a student of the Summer School here. It’s too late to write “I’m excited about everything that’s going on here!”, but it’s absolutely true because it’s my first expedition and I’m amazed by the Arctic!

Frankly speaking, I was afraid to take part in the expedition: I had no scientific research yet, I had no knowledge in climatology, oceanology, meteorology and other parts of geography, because for the last 4 years I’ve been studying only physics and math at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. But in my few first days on the Akademic Fedorov, I found that Summer School is something like a friendly, cozy conference! “I believe we will be a big family by the end of the cruise!” said Vladimir (the Director of the Summer School) on the first day. So what is the Summer School? Well every day some of the participants give presentations about sea ice, climate change, modeling, water circulation in the Arctic Ocean, and so on. “Older guys” expand our knowledge in difficult themes through their lectures, and we expand their knowledge by asking them some tricky questions and expressing our opinions about the topics. Those students who don’t have their own research projects yet give less scientific presentations. For example, I gave a presentation about the history of the Northwest Passage discovery and about the 1st and the 2nd Kamchatska expeditions yesterday, and Lindsay, an instructor for the Summer School, gave a presentation about the communication between “crazy scientists” and “ordinary people” at the very beginning of our cruise. And it was interesting, because science should be easily understood, especially in the case of general facts, problems and worries. That’s why all “presenters of the day” try to make their speeches more interactive and clear for everybody. So this school is a real chance to gain new knowledge from the people who do science in their everyday lives! And it’s cool!

 Also we have some projects and extra activities to gain experience with fieldwork too. We observe clouds and ice, help in the hydrochemistry lab, and launch Kensuke’s weather balloons. And of course we saw polar bears and got out on the ice ourselves!

So I want to finish my post with this photo. It’s sunset on one of the first days of the cruise.- Elena Khavina

Not everyone realizes that science is not just about problem solving, it is about creativity too. You need to be able to look at data and observations and think about it in new ways, in order to model or solve complex things like climate. And sometimes, you also need to just have a creative outlet while you’re waiting for your water samples to come up from miles deep in the ocean. Remember the snowflakes we all created out of paper when we were kids? One of the scientists here has mastered this art, and decorated the inside of the lab with a few incredibly intricate snowflakes – makes the inside look a little like outside!