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We are sailing northwest to our final mooring deployment, then home.
We are currently at lat: -69.5285, lon: -124.078, crossing the Marie Byrd Seamounts. I don’t think anyone knows for certain why or how they formed.
According to Woods Hole (WHOI), the ITP is online and data can be viewed in near-realtime:
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=30775
Even though I’m in Antarctica, this trip has been much warmer than my last trip. Last year it was -40 (C or F, take your pick) for days at a time. This year it has hovered around -3C to 0C. Why is it so much warmer? Because I’m on a boat this year, and the air temperature is limited by the water which never gets very cold, even when covered by a thin layer of ice, whereas last year I was on the continent (covered by 9,000 ft. of ice).
But today we met a cold front and it is a record (for this cruise) at -14C. The sea is smoking and mirages are appearing due to the temperature difference between the -1C water and the -14C air. The icebergs in the distance look like they are floating on air and the sea smoke is wafting by the boat. Some of our instrument sensors are even having some problems if exposed for more than a few minutes to the extreme cold before going swimming.
Location: 0.39 nautical miles off the center of
the Getz ice shelf, Antarctica.
(lat: -74.012, lon: -118.113)
Just a short note to update the map. We are currently zig-zagging to the west along the continental shelf, Amundsen Sea, Antarctica.
Location: lat:-71.6992, lon:-114.6032
http://kenmankoff.com/maps/NBP09-01/
I’ve been asked what it is like when the ice breaker is breaking ice. I’ve never experienced anything like it and had to think for a while how to explain it. The best explanation I can give is this:
Picture the spawn of a building, a roller coaster, and a bumper car, moving in extremely slow motion.
Now picture living on this bumpy rolling building, every day, for two months. Eating, sleeping, giving lectures, taking showers, etc.
The boat is about 6 or 7 stories tall and the length of a city block, so the size of this image is accurate. It goes from 10 knots to stopped when hitting a big ice floe in perhaps 30 seconds, backs up, rams once or twice then moves on. And it rolls around slowly, mostly side to side, up to 20 degrees from upright.
Approximate ITP Location: lat:-74.0017 lon:-109.002
Tags: Antarctica, NBP09-01
The seasons progress, the Earth tilts, and we are sailing North.
We had our first sunset last night. Lasted about 2 hours of reds and oranges, then turned around and spent another two hours doing a full-color sunrise.
We were at lat: -71.9165, lon: -105.8314
Location: lat:-73.877, lon:-116.827
Weather: Stormy. Big waves, two or so meters. Whitecaps. Boat is rocking. Too much motion and to erratic to open the side doors and lower the CTD.
Also, we just saw the strangest thing: A fishing boat.
Prior to yesterday I thought we were very much alone.
We are around 1,200 miles (equivalent New York to somewhere around Kansas) to the bases on the peninsula, where there are a few small scientific outposts (Palmer and Rothera Station, among others).
We are more than 1,500 miles from the big base at McMurdo and Ross Island.
We are almost 2000 miles from our port in Punta Arenas, Chile, which is around 7 days of non-stop sailing to get home.
We are a mere 1,100 miles from the South Pole. That is equivalent to New York to the southern tip of Florida. I thought the closest human beings to us were at the South Pole.
When you are in this type of location, you definitely feel a sense of isolation and being alone (and you take safety very seriously).
But this morning as we sailed toward our CTD waypoint there was a fishing boat sitting there. It was from New Zealand, and we presume it was fishing for Toothfish / Monkfish / Chilean Sea Bass. It was a very strange sight to see.
Yesterday was different. We parked the boat in some fast ice (ice locked to land) and had an ice party. We put out the gangplank and were allowed off the boat. Penguins came over to inspect us.
The reason for this was we needed 12 hours to deploy an Ice Tethered Profiler (ITP), and Ice Mass Balance (IMB) system, and take an ice core. The ITP sits on multi-year ice that will hopefully last another year or two in the current location. Hanging off the ice/buoy is a 750 m tether and a small robot that once a day climbs up and down the tether collecting oceanographic data. Each day it communicates via an inductive modem to the surface base which sends it home via Iridium modem. You should be able to see the buoy we deployed here: http://www.whoi.edu/itp
The ship crane lowered several hundred pounds of equipment onto the ice including a snowmobile. A route was scouted almost three miles away from the boat, and we towed all the gear out there. The ITP deployment design allows two people with just a wrench and a screwdriver to deploy a ~ 400 pound anchor and ~750 m cable (also weighing hundreds of pounds). Photos will come later.
While we set up the ITP another team installed an Ice Mass Balance system. The IMB is a sensor suite that measures approximately the top meter of water, the ice and snow from water to air, and then the top meter of air. It gives a complete picture of the ice-ocean-atmosphere interface. Couple that with the ~800m data from the ITP and it is quite an impressive data set.
It was nice to get off the boat for 10 hours and to do some hard physical labor. And while we worked we watched the nose and gigantic soft black eyes of a seal that used our ice holes as a breathing hole.
Also of Interest…