Lindsay in the Arctic

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!

I have a great story this year for my birthday. I started it out at 78°N latitude and 125°E longitude, not only on a research vessel in the Arctic, but also signed up to assist scientist Kensuke Komatsu with a radiosonde balloon launch (a radiosonde is a scientific weather balloon that takes measurements of the atmosphere is it rises). Kensuke fills it with helium, and then attaches an instrument box to the string which measures atmospheric pressure, height, humidity, wind, and has GPS to monitor its position. The sound of a balloon being inflated to that size right by your head is a little disconcerting, but I was mainly terrified of letting it go too early. I was glad that Eric, a student in the Summer School, was there as another of Kensuke’s launch assistants. A couple people were also up to celebrate with me at 1:30am ship time (the balloons are released every 6 hours, day and night), and we even wrote “Happy Birthday Lindsay” on the balloon. (I also added the initials “AB” to the balloon, which are my brother Anthony’s initials.) Signing a weather balloon and releasing it into the Arctic atmosphere? Then later in the afternoon, seeing this view? Then a card with birthday wishes in multiple languages? Not a bad birthday.

And, not only was it my birthday today, but yesterday we celebrated two other recent birthdays, Sasha Chernokulsky as well as Kensuke! The students (including me and Eric) in the Russian class onboard – aka the “NABOS Summer School Choir: Children of the Akademik Fedorov” – learned a Russian birthday song to sing as a surprise at dinner. All I can say about that is we did our best. Sasha and Kensuke also got homemade cards signed by everyone, and we all had some yummy cake. We just may get to have some again later today…

 

As you probably can guess from the title of my post, today is the “equator” of our trip to the Northern seas. And also it’s my turn to write the post for the blog, so I think it’s a good idea to sum up everything that’s happened to me during these two and a half weeks onboard. I’m not going to do it in detail but I will try to remember the most wonderful things for me.

I came here from Moscow as a student of the Summer School, and this is my first experience participating in an Arctic expedition, so I have mixed feelings about things that are happening here to me. On one hand, I am in almost total isolation from the entire world and my friends and family, and I know about news only from letters from my friends. During my first week here it was a real problem for me, although after 2 weeks passed I finally realized that the absence of internet and a mobile phone is not as catastrophic as it seemed to me in the beginning. On the other hand, this certainly is not the most interesting thing, as there are really A LOT of exciting events happening here, and the experiences I am having seem really unique. All the lectures here are given by real professionals and have no chance of being boring, the fieldwork we take part in is very exciting, and all of the people and the atmosphere onboard are pretty nice and friendly. For example, problems with taking measurements or some other scientific problems can easily be a discussed at lunch, just because the people at the table are really interested. It’s a pleasure for me to listen to a person that is telling me something that he or she is very excited about! Sometimes people just share the impressions they had from doing one of the observations or experiments. The most exciting activity for me was walking on the ice and drilling a hole in it to find out how thick it is. For me, what I am most curious about here is the view of the scientists and students from different countries on climate change and global warming problems, and I am looking forward to starting my own research in this field.

 So I feel like the two and a half weeks I’ve spent here are definitely one of the most interesting and memorable experience I’ve ever had.

 – Maria Parfenova

Carry out field studies in hard-to-access regions of world oceans… Obtain unique data on Arctic environment… Check new instruments and methods… Collect new data on global climate variability…

These are lofty aspirations, but they are the goals of this expedition, and NABOS (Nansen and Amundsen Basins Observational Systems), an international collaborative project launched in 2002. Chief Scientist Vladimir Ivanov took some time to talk with students onboard about how NABOS continually monitors water properties in the Arctic Ocean. Of course it’s not possible for us to physically be in the Arctic to do research at all times. How NABOS does it is by deploying autonomous, anchored buoys and moorings, with instruments that continually measure things like temperature, salinity (salt content), oxygen levels, current, and pressure. (And that’s ALL the way to the bottom, over 2.5miles down).  NABOS started as a collaboration between the International Arctic Research Center in the US and the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in Russia, and is funded by the National Science Foundation. And it has now turned into a global effort with multiple countries working together – which is also helpful when you have to navigate politics and geographical boundaries in addition to the ocean. What’s new for NABOS 2013? Students! The NABOS Summer School was included to give graduate students a chance to get a firsthand look at the Arctic, and Arctic research. (What an opportunity!)

What has NABOS found over the years?

An abrupt warming (0.8°C) in Atlantic water layer, captured in the Laptev Sea in 2004 A distinct seasonal cycle of +/- 1°C, revealed deep in water under the pack ice A temporary disappearance for 1 month of an Atlantic water layer at the East Siberian Sea slope A continuous warming in Antarctic water layer …And more to come!