KenMankoff

Life Stinks

Yesterday we excited the ice (on the Southern side) into a polynya in the Pine Island Bay. The water turned from a clear dark blue to green. We are sailing through the most biologically productive ocean on the planet. I’m not sure but the seas here might have even more life than a rainforest. And it stinks.
 
The smell is subtle inside, but when you are working outside or with the doors open there is a strong smell of rotting vegetables.
 
In other news, land ho! We still cannot see the mainland but have passed some small islands. The islands are on the maps from satellites, but we are charting new waters and making our bathymetry maps as we go. We should see the continent (or at least the ice sheet covering the continent) within a day or two depending on our meandering path.
 
Current location: lat:-74.104 lon:-105.423
Current Temperature: -1.3C Air, 1.2C Water
Wildlife today: Billions of diatoms one Minke whale and a seal.

Sun On Horizon

Does anyone know the scientific term for the path of the Sun as it travels toward the horizon or away from the horizon without crossing it? We no longer have sunset and sunrise.
 
We have hours of dusk and dawn but it isn’t easy to distinguish when one turns into the other. These are getting shorter as we head south faster than the Sun appears to be retreating as Earth moves toward a Northern Hemisphere Summer.
 
A month from when we are still down here it should start getting colder. On our return trip North the darkness should greet us much farther south than where we left it.

Off the Boat

Photo is from two days ago. Got off the boat to help with sea ice sampling. Drilled through 2m of ice, measured salinity, structure, temperature.
 
Today:
 
Current Location: lat:-73.6133 lon:-106.7283
 
Temperature: Around 0C. Going outside in just jeans and a sweater for most photos and a look around. Wearing much more gear when actually spending time working outdoors
 
We’ve just left the thick sea ice and are now in the open water of pine island bay. Ice coverage is around 10%, small chunks the size of a table, with gigantic tabular bergs every once in a while.
 
Worked out this morning on the rowing machine. Didn’t seem to help the boat move any faster. We move around 10 knots and stop every three or four hours for a few hours while we deploy stuff, then continue. 10 knots now that we are out of the sea ice, 3 or so when in the ice.

Icebergs and Sunlight

(Out of Order Repost)
 
And this morning there are more… I woke up and looked outside and at a glance there are 30 icebergs within view off the starboard side of the ship. Still no sea ice but that should show up within a day or two.
 
And we’ve crossed into the Antarctic circle, and it is close enough to solstice that the sun won’t set anymore. It is low to the horizon. I’m expecting the next 6 or 7 hours to be a rosy dusk/dawn. Hopefully the icebergs will turn pink.
 
lat: -66.788, lon: -95.924

Going Where In A Basket?

Moon and Snow

Icebergs and Whales

(Out of Order Repost)
 
The iceberg I saw a few hours ago was a sign of things to come. We are now surrounded by a dozen or so of them. Big and small, nearby and drifting over the horizon. These are just big ice cubes, nothing huge and tabular yet, and no sea ice yet.
 
And playing near the ship are a pod of Minke whales.
 
Not a bad day at the office…

ARGO

The boat has an interesting variety of low-tech and high-tech sensors. Perhaps the simplest is the ‘ice drifter’. It is just a suitcase placed on an ice floe full of batteries that power two things: 1) A GPS receiver, and 2) A satellite phone transmitter that transmits the location. When the batteries die or the ice melts, that sensor is done. (The first versions floated after the ice melted, and ended having quite a phone bill. Current version have some holes drilled in the suitcase (Yes, liquid ocean current drifting data is useful too, but I guess the project wasn’t funded for that)).
 
If you want to follow along with a high-tech sensor you can. Search for “ARGO Drifter”. These little yellow drifters get put directly into the water, not on ice. They go down to a pre-programmed depth, maintain neutral buoyancy, float along, and every so often rise up to the surface and report the data they collected. Repeat for a few years. It is smart enough to detect when it is attempting to surface while under ice and waits until open water. You can watch them in realtime on the ARGO website. Let me know if you see any that we deployed.

Breaking Ice Trails

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