POLAR NIGHT WINTER CRUISE

Picture of the week: Helmer Hanssen in ice in Rjipfjorden.

Full moon provided some light at the beginning of the cruise

Because of the delay in the ship yard and in order to save time, there were 5 of us who flew from Longyearbyen to Tromsø to (ironically) catch the Hilmar Hansen northbound.  After a relaxing morning at home and goodbyes to Nicole and the boys, the flight went well and we arrived about an hour before departure.  We had a nice snowy sendoff and then steamed out of the fjord.  The near full moon came out and with the causeways along the waterway and the steep surrounding mountains it was an exceptional view.  About 8 hours later we entered the Barents Sea and the ship began to bounce around.   I did not feel my best, so slept in past breakfast.  That afternoon we started the “lecture series” on board where everyone gives talks about what they are doing and some on general science.  It is in a “lecture room” along the forward hull of the ship, so we were all moving with the waves and trying to concentrate on the slides (not out inner ears!).  I had to make some cables and put the system together, so I had some work to do, but it was relaxed.  Late that next night we reached Bear Island, the halfway point between Mainland Norway and Svalbard.  It is also the sight where Amundsen’s airplane went down when he was trying to search for the Italian explorers.  There were low clouds over the island and again, the full moon provided the faint illumination of the island’s contour.  The following day, still in transit, was much the same, but in addition to working on set up, gave a lecture on bioluminescence and what I hoped to measure on the cruise.  There was another day of transit on Wednesday along the west side of Svalbard (yes, part of me wanted to take a left and get off in Longyearbyen).   The highlight came later that night when we passed the island of Moffen. I had been there once before and it is known as a large walrus colony.  Very few people have been here in the winter though, so almost nothing is known about their winter locations, behaviors, etc.  Working with Jørgen from UNIS, we were able to get a high powered infrared camera on the ship from a company in Trondheim (Aptomar).  It is used for search and rescue and oil spills, but I thought it might be useful in locating birds during the polar night.  We passed within 8km of the island and using this high powered IR camera, were able to “see” heat signatures from about 20 walruses along the beach.

Arriving at the ship in Tromsø.

Leaving the fjord system from Tromsø under the moonlight.

One of four daily lectures on board.

Lumpsucker caught in the bottom trawl.

We arrived in Rijpfjorden at about 2am on Thursday and started working.  First were some sediment cores (mud from the bottom) to look at the respiration rates of the bottom.  While this is a known quantity in most locations, there are no measurements of many of these efforts for this time of year in the high arctic.  So essentially everything we are finding is new in some way to science.  We then started with hauling nets at the bottom, mid-water and surface, pulling up large numbers of fish, shrimp, squid, and copepods.  The warm water from the Atlantic is intruding far north this year, bringing with it a number of species (Atlantic cod and haddock).   We then started work on collection of water for looking at the microbial communities and their activities.  This took us well into the night and everyone on the ship was looking ragged.
This trip has also made me realize how connected we are to the internet, email, and the basic information that is usually at our fingertips.  Here we cannot talk to the outside, answer questions in an instant, do many of the work requirements, or load a blog!  My first 20 years of oceanographic cruises were similarly isolated, but I had forgotten.
 
We moved the ship into the fast ice (ice connected to land) at the back of the fjord the following day for ice coring (seeing what organisms were in the ice).  The cruise leader and I got off the ship first as the polar bear watch for the others working on the ice.  There were 4 sets of tracks right along the ice edge so we took a walk around the area (about 500m around the ship).  As we walked away from the ship the lights of the ship faded and the sky lit up.  The moon was just setting and jets of northern lights streamed above the horizon.  It was still and all we could hear was the crunching of our boots on the snow.  It is crystal clear in these situations how isolated we are.  After the work on the ice, we got back on the ship and moved back into the fjord to continue the net sampling.  Three of us were also able to take the zodiac off the ship to collect a few birds.  It is not well documented what kind of birds stay in these areas during the winter and how they continue to obtain food (or what they are eating).  We saw two birds, but they were too fast and too far away.  We stayed in the boat until the ship did a couple of mid water trawls with the big nets, so we were out for about 2 hours.  Even more than on the ice, there was that feeling of isolation as we watched our lifeline move into the distance.  While in the boat we all peered over the side looking down into the water and were treated to an amazing display of bioluminescence.  At all depths there were flashes and glows of blue light give off by jellyfish and ctenophores, copepods and dinoflagellates.  Jorgen described it best when he said it looked like we were looking into space and watching  galaxies and solar systems moving in fast forward.  The ice was just forming in the fjord, catching some of these organisms in the ice matrix and causing them to have a consistent glow which lit up the small plates of ice blue… quite an amazing sight!

On Polar Bear watch in Rjipfjorden while other collected ice cores.

Evidence of visitors on the sea ice.

Boat leaving us for bird collection.

Ship hauling in a trawl.

Driving the boat in Rjipfjorden.

We finished the work in the fjord Friday evening and started heading to the ice station.  I stayed up most of the night stopping along the way taking profiles of the water’s temperature and salinity to document the strong influence of Atlantic water in this area.  We started hitting pancake ice (small discs of ice with built up edges from nudging other ice) at about 81.5 N and the pack ice about 20 km later.  This place is called Sofia Deep and is in the Arctic Basin, the true Arctic Ocean.  We conducted many of the same operations, however with it being so deep (2,500 meters), everything took longer.  We drifted even further north and with the ice starting to get thick, the net operations stopped and a small group were lowered onto the ice flow to sample the ice.  We figured we were probably the northern most humans at that point sans any submarines lurking in the deep further north.  We started south towards Moffen Island on Saturday against a pretty good swell.  We also passed over the jet of Atlantic water flowing north and with the cold air and warm water, we hit a pretty thick fog bank.  This warm water is likely the reason for the ice edge being so far north this year.

Arriving into the ice station, we first encountered this "pancake" ice.

Early morning on the way back south taking profiles of salinity and temperature from the command station.

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