Being a physicist, it’s funny that being on the ship messes with my sense of space/time. I have mentioned on the blog that time becomes kind of irrelevant on the ship. Day and night are hard to define when the ship clocks (on Norway time) say it’s daytime, but according to the Sun and the time zone we’re in, it’s nighttime. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are also hard to define (given the available technology that I’m working with to get these blogs to you), because I may be describing an event from yesterday (when we were at Point A), and by the time you read it, we are now at Point B – not to mention that you readers are all in different time zones around the world too. But, want to know how and when we have been getting from Point A to B? (And how the temperature has varied – or not so much – day by day?) Here are the navigational coordinates I have logged every day. Keep in mind that on most days, we moved around a lot. Remember I talked about transects? These are straight paths along which we stop at several “stations” to deploy instruments into the water or onto the ice. And remember what I said about ice conditions – that we have needed to make route adjustments a couple times when ice on the planned route got to be too much? So, even this list can’t quite track our entire route. I made a couple notes about some milestones along the way. But of course there were LOTS of super cool operations along the way – mooring deployments, conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) casts, ice-tethered profilers (ITPs), and more. So go grab a globe or a map. Happy mapping!
Here’s how the data is listed below:
Date
Latitude, Longitude
Air Temperature, Water Temperature
8/20
69°43’N, 30°03’E
15°C, 13°C
*At our port town of Kirkenes, Norway
8/21
75°03’N, 46°22’E
8°C, 8°C
8/22
76°11’N, 50°32’E
7°C, 7°C
8/23
80°59’N, 72°55’E
3°C, 3°C
8/24
81°40’N, 88°52’E
1°C, 1°C
*About the time when we first got to sea ice
8/25
79°32’N, 105°32’E
1°C, 1°C
8/26
77°12’N, 124°50’E
0°C, 0°C
8/27
78°09’N, 125°48’E
0°C, 0°C
8/28
79°57’N, 125°59’E
0°C, 2°C
8/29
80°47’N, 125°42’E
0°C, -1°C
8/30
80°48’N, 132°37’E
0°C, -1°C
8/31
79°37’N, 143°19’E
-1°C, -1°C
9/1
80°37’N, 137°39’E
-2°C, -1°C
9/2
79°59’N, 152°01’E
-6°C, -1°C
* About the time when the Sun came out, along with the not-too-far-off pair of polar bears
9/3
80°13’N, 155°48’E
-2°C, -1°C
*When we went out on the ice to deploy multiple buoys and instruments (ice-tethered profiler, ice-mass balance buoy, o-buoy, met buoy, met tower), and students practiced taking ice measurements
9/4
79°35’N, 148°05’E
1°C, 1°C
9/5
78°33’N, 133°45’E
0°C, 0°C
9/6
77°38’N, 125°51’E
1°C, 1°C
9/7
79°45’N, 125°46’E
3°C, 2°C
9/8
78°26’N, 125°53’E
0°C, 0°C
9/9
80°00’N, 115°25’E
0°C, -1°C
9/10
79°56’N, 107°42’E
-1°C, 0°C
9/11
82°03’N, 112°17’E
-4°, -1°
*Where we are “now” (as I’m writing this). We are stopped to deploy an ice-tethered profiler; notice the sea ice outside now – no waves. Calm ship = calm tummies!
- As I’m writing this, scientists and technicians are off the ship, on the ice, deploying an ITP (ice-tethered profiler), which will measure the temperature and salinity of water from instruments going up and down a LONG cable under the ice.
Do you measure the distance you travel during the trip?
Hi Jonathan, we definitely keep track of our route. As for distance, we’ll add it all up at the end, but it is going to be several thousand miles for sure!
how light do u have to be to walk on the ice
Hi Kaderrius, when we go out on the ice, we make sure that it is safe and thick enough first. When the ice is a few feet thick, no one is going to break the ice under his/her weight. It takes the ship to break through the ice, so we are fine! We also have heavy equipment on the ice too, and trust me, the ice where we stop is solid. 🙂
how long does it take to set up the ITP ?
Hi Jorge, good question, it is actually a several hour process. After you confirm that the ice is safe to work on, you have to use the crane to lower all the equipment and scientific instruments onto the ice (and the crane also lowers the people onto the ice too), then they have to drill a hole, install and secure the equipment, and then get everything back onboard with the crane. So it’s a process!
Beside the technological devices on board the ship, have you or the crew been able to identify landmarks in the surrounding landscape that helps to identify your location?
Dear Julian, we don’t see anything except for water and ice, so we have to rely on the navigational instruments to tell us our position. We also have radar, which tells us about ice conditions around us. At one point we passed an island that was so far away that we couldn’t even tell whether it was a faint strip of land in the distance, or just clouds. But there are no landmarks anywhere, just water.
How did you learn to use the technology that is on the ship and was it hard to learn to use them
Hi Ashley, it has been a challenge, but also inspiring, to learn about all the technology and science onboard! I have been learning about the instruments that take measurements of ocean water all the way to the bottom and others that take measurements of the sea ice, and also the equipment that helps us take those data! There are scientists and technicians onboard to operate all of those things, so I have not operated this equipment myself. That would take some more learning and training!