KenMankoff

More Photos from Antarctica (LMG09-09)

I’ve finally gotten around to uploading some photos from the latest trip to Antarctica. We sailed on the Laurence M. Gould through the Drake Passage and the Bellingshausen Sea, then along the Antarctic Peninsula to Palmer Station. We saw a lot of ice and some wildlife.

If you want to read about the trip you can do so here or by clicking on the LMG09-09 tag to the right.

If you were on the ship here is a GPX file so you can geotag your own photos.

Phosphorescing Sea Ice

This footage was shot by Harriet Mankoff on September 22nd 2009 in the Drake Passage near 60 degrees South. It shows what I have labeled “phosphorescing sea ice” due to the white flashes at the wave crests. The sea is covered by pancake ice and slush. At the wave crest the slush builds up enough that the water drains out of the slush and it looks brighter. The reverse happens in some of the troughs.

An Interview

I was in an interview last month highlighting some of the work done by The Climate Project. Watch below.

Land Ho (Again)

As I write this we are once again in the Straits of Magellan. Land (green, not white) is visible on both sides of the ship. Some dolphins are porpoising in our wake.

Internet and solid ground and fresh vegetables await us in just a few hours. Then, ~36 hours of travel home.

Trip summary:

Science & operations: 23 days at sea. 23 CTDs. Max wave height was about 30 feet. Strongest winds were about 100 mph! Minimum air temperature (on boat) was -7.51 C, although it got quite a bit colder on the glacier. Minimum latitude: -64.99.

Pleasure: 1 Glacier hike. 1 Antarctic hot tub. 1 Zodiac ride.

Fauna: 1 Minke whale, 2 dolphins, a dozen or so seals, and one penguin colony (several hundred large, but far enough away they were just gray dots).

Dolphin

Dolphin, surfing the wake of the Laurence M. Gould in the Straits of Magellan.

Hurry up and Wait

There are a few key mantras I’ve learned to repeat while I’m down here:

Be Flexible. It’s a Harsh Continent. Hurry Up and Wait.

We’re dealing with all three of those right now.

We have left Palmer Station but have sailed South rather than North or homeward. About 40 nautical miles SSW of Palmer Station is Hugo Island. Next to Hugo is a small rock called Santa Claus Rock (I think). On this rock sits a malfunctioning weather and GPS station and we are tasked with fixing it.

Fixing it involves sending a shore party out in a Zodiac. They will attempt a landing amid breaking waves on a snow-covered rocky beach. If successful, they will then attempt to fix the weather/GPS station, and motor back to the ship. Then we sail north to port in Punta Arenas, Chile, where we catch a plane home.

Unfortunately there are strong winds, thick fog, dense sea ice, and large swells under the ice. So we are sitting and waiting. If the weather clears, the ice thins, and the waves are calm enough to land the Zodiac then perhaps we’ll be able to repair the station. Otherwise we’ll wait, perhaps up to 3 days, at which point we must head home due to port call deadlines. Another cruise, in a few months, will make another attempt.

The weather component measures the… weather. And the GPS component is measuring continental rebound. During the last ice age there was a lot more ice here. This ice weighed a lot and pushed the crust of the earth down. The ice left relatively quickly, but the crustal rebound continues today. This process will continue in the future as more ice melts, and seas rise, due to both natural and human-induced climate change. A side-effect of this is that over long periods of time, certain places might experience relative sea-level drop rather than rise, although they are likely to get wet over the short term.

In a Boat

Harriet Mankoff in The Laurence M. Gould docked at Palmer Station, Antarctica.

On Station

Pancakes

Pancake Ice on Waves, Drake Passage, Antarctica.
(61 29.95S, 62 24.68W)

A Warm Europa?

Yesterday I spent an hour in a different world. I’ve seen sights in Antarctica before that I thought were foreign, but nothing like this. This was the birth of sea ice, and even the veteran captain of the ship had never seen anything like it before.

I call it Phosphorescing Pancake Ice. I think the technical term would be Pancake Ice mixed with Slush, and it coated the surface of the sea as far as one could see.

We’ve been trained through experiences to expect large bodies of water to behave a certain way. Few of us have been unlucky, odd, or lucky enough to observe large bodies of liquid other than pure water under normal g forces. The few us that have helped clean up an oil spill, worked in an industrial Jello(TM)(R) plant, day-dreamed of oceans on Mars, or sailed the seas of Antarctic might understand what we saw yesterday.

The waves rolled past us. But something was different. They were both too tall and too low and wide, at the same time, for themselves. They appeared to move in slow motion. There were no small ripples on the surface of these giant swells. They were completely smooth. The pancake-pattern coating of ice made the surface look like the body of a giant white leopard flexing its muscles underneath us.

This much is common, when sea ice is born. But our seas had just the right amount of slush so that each wave glowed or flashed as the peak moved slowly by us. I think the water was draining from the peak of each wave so that the slush flashed a pure snow-white as opposed to a wet gray on the face and trough.

We captured HD video of it but I cannot post it from the boat. I think there will be plenty of images or movies of “Pancake Ice” if you search the interweb. Combine one of these images with an image of “Phosphorescence Sea Waves” to get graphic of what I describe above.