KenMankoff

A Perfect Day

Today was a good day. We’ve had a few frustrating days where nothing seemed to go right, but overall the cruise has been nice, even if the instruments are confusing, the seas were rough and the weather gray. But days like today are the reason we are all here.
 
It was our first sunny day (sunny night too). There was not a cloud in the sky and the bright sun drifted lazily, West to East, over the pole all night long while I worked. The sky was bright blue, with some shades of pink around 4AM ship time (solar midnight). The snow and ice bergs were bright white. The water was a clear dark blue. The moon, almost full, hung in the sky opposite the sun, drifting East to West.
 
I woke around 9PM, ate at the midnight meal, and started work shortly after midnight, lowering a CTD and rosette sampling system 750m down, waiting for it to come back up, and then collecting samples of cold deep Antarctic water. Cold to touch, but at around 2C significantly warmer than the surface waters of -1.7C.
 
After the CTD came the best part: I got to leave the ship. We spent about two hours finding a nice stable ice floe. The crane picked us and our gear up, reached over the side, and lowered us. We were dressed for safety with hard hats and floater jackets and harnessed into the basket. We reached over the side, probing the snowpack for stable ice below. After finding it we unclipped and stepped off.
 
We spent the next hour or two digging away the snow cover, drilling holes through the ice, and taking measurements of temperature, salinity, and ice structure. We then packed up samples to take back to the ship, freeze, and analyze at a later date.
 
All the while, in the distance, some Emperor penguins paid us no attention.
 
Location: lat:-71.729, lon:-103.033