For twelve days we have been drifting with one and the same ice floe. The wind took us many kilometer westwards from where we started on April 24 2008.
But yesterday it was decided to move the ship to a new location. Yesterday we cut only through thin ice., which hardly made any noise. But today, I finally feel that we are on an icebreaker. Ice floes crack and break under the ship. Cracks cut tens of meters through the ice and split it in pieces. More than half of the day we are breaking ice. Today we are closer to the coast and the ice floes here are more than a meter thick. But the Amundsen can break through more than three meters. When the ship loses speed by breaking through thick ice, it sometimes moves backward for a while, to gain more momentum.
Both yesterday and today I joined a helicopter flight with scientist John Iacozza and pilot Serge Arseneau. For the first time since we flew from Inuvik to the Amundsen, I can see the ice from a bird’s eye. I see all the details that get lost in satellite images. Small lakes, narrow channels; small ice islands in open water; ice floes that moved on top of each other. Sometimes it looks as if a gigantic crystal glass has broken into thousand pieces above the arctic waters. Beautiful geometry. Almost like abstract paintings that would fit perfectly in the Museum of Modern Art.
The Circumpolar Flaw Lead Study (CFL) started in October 2007 and will continue till august 2008. After that, the scientists will need about two years to analyze all the results, write scientific papers and summarize the CFL-results.
It’s too early yet for detailed scientific conclusions of the CFL-study. But something can be said already about the ice conditions in the Amundsen Gulf. The ice in the Amundsen Gulf is breaking up about a month earlier than usual. That’s even faster than was thought at the beginning of CFL. Over the recent years there seems to be a systematic trend towards later freezing and earlier melting. And the multiyear ice has become thinner, while it’s extent is shrinking too.
This fits into the picture of the state of the sea ice for the whole Arctic. Two days ago, on May 5 2008, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) announced that, to avoid beating the September 2007 record low ice extent in the Arctic, more than 50% of the first-year ice would have to survive the summer melting season. This happened only once in the last 25 years. On average only 30% of the first year ice survives the summer.
The available sea ice data point to another extreme sea ice minimum extent for September 2008.
Forget about the image of the pole cap as a flat, uniform, boring ice plate. The sea ice is a sleeping, seductive and unpredictable monster. Today, we went by snow scooter a bit farther from the ship than before. We parked the snow scooter on a – at first sight – flat piece of ice.
But even here, I can see differences from meter to meter. Here, the snow is a bit thicker, there a bit thinner; here it is a bit whiter, there a bit darker; here the wind has blown small ribbles in the snow, there some bigger ones. They look like small sand dunes.
The researchers start their experiments. Jens Ehn is measuring the light reflection by the snow and the ice. A little further away, Natalie Asselin is coring a hole in the ice. When that’s done, Véronique Lago lowers an instrument tied tot a sixty-meter rope into the sea water. She measures the temperature, the pressure and the salinity of the first sixty meters of the seawater below our feet.
Meanwhile, I look around. Beautiful pressure ridges are sticking out of the ice some tens of meters away. I take my camera and walk towards the ridge. The terrain gets rougher and rougher. Sometimes I sink half a meter into the snow. When I am almost there, Jens shouts that I have to come back. He is our gunman, and I don’t carry one (neither do I know how to shoot).
As soon as the experiments are finished, we drive by snow scooter to the ridge that I saw. Big, rectangular pieces of ice stick up. White at the top, more and more blue towards the bottom. Some of them stick out so far, that ice caves have formed underneath. I lie on my belly to look inside one of the ice caves. Against a fully, eye blue background, water is dropping from tens of small ice stalgtites.
The sun is shining, and it is only -8 Celsius. Master student Natalie Asselin lies down on a pressed up ice block and takes a sunbath. We try to throw snowballs, but it’s not the type of snowball snow. The snowballs fall hopelessly apart in the air.
From a distance I can see a tower made of ice cores. Master corer Benoit Philipe has built the tower two days ago. On one day he managed to make a record number of 109 ice cores. He is already coring for many days. No wonder the pole is losing ice, is the joke that soon went around. From the core pieces that he didn’t use, he built the ice tower.
I can feel at the snow and the ice that it is getting spring. De snow gets stickier, the top layer of the ice softer. I take a piece of an ice core and suck on it. Tastes salty. This is young ice. I look at it’s structure, and I see some thick droplets of brine. Droplets with a high salinity. When the seawater freezes, the salt is expelled from the ice crystals. It gets trapped in pockets between the crystals. The brine stays liquid, as a much lower temperature would be needed to freeze them.
The longer the ice stays frozen, the bigger the chance that the brine manages to escape, leaves holes in the ice behind, and lands in the seawater. There, it plays an important part in the ocean circulation. It makes the salinity of the sea water higher, making the water heavier. The heavier water sinks and can transport big amounts of water over hundreds of kilometers.
When I tell Jens that, until my preparation for the Amundsen trip, I imagined the pole cap to be a flat ice pancake, he tells: “That’s the way the ice modelers still look at it.” But OK, they have to. Modeling is simplifying. The art is to undress the sea ice in such a way that you can model it mathematically, but that the results still look like describing real sea ice.
The ice is getting spring fever. It opens up more and more. At the bottom of the sea ice the ice algae start their blooming season. In the last couple of days we have seen the first birds arriving. My Inuit room mate Roger Memorana recognizes and counts them all. A black guillemot was the first to arrive. Next were the glaucous gull and the snow bunting.
In the next months to come, more and more colorful life will arrive to the sea ice, the flaw leads and the polynyas. Roger gives me list of some thirty types of birds that still have to arrive. It’s a big pity that I have to leave in three days.
The thermometer reads -8 degrees Celsius as we set foot on the ice at 09.30. The wind makes it feel like -18. Today I am wearing arctic boots for the first time. Thanks to technician Joanne Delaronde, who looked yesterday on the ice a bit worried at my mountain boots and asked whether I did not have cold feet in them. Yes, I did. She managed to find me some size-11 spare boots, which I can use the rest of my stay with the Amundsen.
Experimenting, digging or drilling at one spot on the ice means a lot of standing, little walking, and so even quicker getting cold feet. The cold was cutting in due time through my mountain shoes. And filling them with three pair of thick socks meant that there was no air layer anymore inside to fight the freezing cold. To dam the cold cutting through, arctic boots have a kind of inner sole with air pockets, which use the great insulating properties of still air.
Today we are first going to measure CO2-concentrations in the ice.
A flag in the ice points the way we are heading to by snow scooter. Three days ago technician Keith Johnson from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans – IOS put there four tubes with permeable walls into the ice, at four different depths. Now they are frozen into the ice. “We call them peepers”, Keith says. The ‘peepers’ slowly take in CO2 from the surrounding ice, until the concentration in the tubes is the same as in the ice. Three days should be enough for that slow process, he hopes.
Arriving at the spot with the flag, some small metal pipes stick into the air. Through these little pipes the gas from the tubes is analyzed. PhD-student Nicolas-Xavier Geilfus from the University of Brussels reads the CO2-concentrations and Keith writes them down.
“We know pretty well how much CO2 the oceans absorb”, Keith tells, “but the role of the sea ice in the exchange of CO2-fluxes is much less known. This is what we are trying to find out with our measurements. In the winter, when it’s really cold, the ice works as an insulating cap between the atmosphere and the seawater. Then there is no CO2-flux going through. But in the spring, when the air is getting warmer, the ice gets warmer too. Channels in the ice form, which can transport CO2 from the atmosphere to the seawater and vice versa.”
“Besides this, we also want to know what is the role of the CO2-exchange for the ecological system. In the spring, the algae start to bloom. They can absorb a lot of CO2 through the ice.”
When finished with the measurements, we leave the tubes behind us in the ice. “May be we can use them again later”, says Keith. “When the Amundsen leaves this ice floe, a transponder will be left on the floe. So, even when we leave to somewhere else, we will still be able to tell where this piece of ice is drifting. We can use the helicopter or the Amundsen to come back to do new measurements with the tubes or to take them out of the ice.”
When we are done with the CO2-measurements, we drive by snow scooter to the other side of the boat. It’s much windier over there. At the previous spot, the ship was shielding the wind from us. Still, I love to be outside, though it’s good to know that the Amundsen is always close, in case your body really would start to get cold.
PhD-student Jens Ehn from the University of Manitoba sets his albedo meter up and measures the light reflection. Sea ice with wet snow on top reflects more than seventy percent, sea ice with dry snow even more than eighty. The more ice melts, the more water, and the more light is absorbed. Which means that the ice starts to melt even more.
After two hours working on the ice, we return to the boat. Still, I do not have cold feet. A big hurrah for the arctic boots.
But even the modern, high-tech arctic boots, lose the game against the traditional Inuit shoes, or ‘kamik’, tells my Inuit-roommate Roger Memorana. I ask him how they are made. “The sole consists of three layers”, he tells. “At the bottom: moose skin, in the middle: musk ox wool and on the top: duffle. The rest of the ‘kamik’ is made out of caribou skin, musk ox skin or – if you want them to be complete waterproof – seal skin.”
“The kamik are both warmer and lighter than the shoes you were wearing today”, Roger tells me. All the other experienced arctic researchers whom I ask agree.
Yesterday it was decided that the boat will leave it’s present drifting position in the ice on May 1 to sail into Prince of Wales Strait. But any planning on the Amundsen is tricky business, as the behavior of the weather and the sea ice can change plans within an hour. So it happened that yesterday’s plan has already been thrown into the dustbin. The sea ice conditions have changed dramatically in the last day. Blame the wind. It is no longer possible to safely enter Prince of Wales Strait.
We will leave one of these days, but nobody knows when and to which new home in the ice.
Up till now, every day that I have been on the Amundsen, the ice and the sky have looked differently. We have had a foggy day, a sunny day, a very windy day and today was a cloudy day with some wind, but not as much as yesterday. Dark clouds were today hanging above the open water that we can see from the ship. Actually, the sky can tell something about the state of the ice. More open water means a higher chance for cloud formation. The water, the ice, the atmosphere – they all shake hands.
In the morning I have joined John Iacozza on the ice. On a tiny white sledge he was dragging a 1.5 meters long red cylinder over the rough ice, equipped with an ice measuring instrument. By sending electromagnetic waves through the ice and measuring how much comes back, the instrument unravels the thickness of the snow covered ice. It has a built in GPS that gives the geographic position with a one-meter accuracy. The instrument is basically used to check the measurements of a similar type of equipment that John uses in the helicopter to measure ice thickness over a much larger area from the air.
I love the pressure ridges in the ice. The ones I saw today had a bluish color. Small ice mountains that easily make you stumble. I have always had the image in my mind of ice as something flat, but the pressure ridges show the enormous power of colliding ice floes. They are a miniature version of the formation of mountains in the earth’s crust by the colliding tectonic plates. Around the present position of the Amundsen, pressure ridges are up to half a meter. Dwarfs. A few days ago John saw from the helicopter pressure ridges close to Banks Island that were seven meters high.
And the ridges are very photogenic too...
Sea ice hides some funny secrets. First year ice is bluish, whereas multi year ice appears whiter. Multi year ice contains much less brine than first year ice, so it is much less salty. You can even taste the difference. If you would melt several years old sea ice, you can drink a fresh cup of arctic water, naturally cleaned from the salt. Multi year ice also contains more air pockets than first year ice. And if you look at a satellite image, you can also see the difference between one year and multi year ice. Mutli year ice looks much brighter on the image, as it scatters more electromagnetic waves back.
I don’t know whether the Amundsen has been given it’s red color for photographic purposes, but whether it’s sunny, foggy or cloudy, whether the Amundsen surrounded by snow, ice or open water, the red vessel in the background always makes a great photo shot. Just press the button.
Coming from the Netherlands – a country with quite rarely snow & ice – my first three arctic days on ‘The Ice’ have been amazing.
After the first day of getting to know the people on the boat and the Amundsen itself, I have joined yesterday and today the scientific fieldwork in the morning. Finally on the ice myself.
Yesterday I have joined a group led by Benoit Philipe, drilling 1,3 meters long ice cores. Our temporary home on the ice was covered in fog, which gave the boat, seen from a distance, a mystical touch. Temperature was –15 Celsius, but there was no wind at all. Cores were taken out of the ice, cut into pieces and put into insulating bottles, to analyze them on the ship. Looking for ice algae – the brownish stuff at the bottom of the ice cores – and for tiny arctic fauna like nematodes and worms. And also for carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, to uncover the arctic secret of carbon fluxes in and out of the ice.
Today the sun was shining in the morning, but it was –18 Celsius and there was quite some wind. Now I know what wind-chill in the arctic means. I have felt my feet the rest of the day. This time our group, led by John Yackel, was digging two snow pits of about 15 centimeter of snow that was lying on the ice. They measured at the spot some physical properties of the snow cover and took samples back to the boat to analyze some other. The thicker the snow cover, the warmer the ice. And that influences it’s physical properties.
At tonight’s scientific meeting John Iacozza reported about his ice reconnaissance helicopter flight of today. The instruments in the helicopter measure ice thickness and by flying low over the area he was also able to see the state of the ice. He noticed much open water and much new, thin ice. He said that it is very unusual to see in April already that much open water in this area.
John Yackel showed three satellite images from 23, 8 and 2 hours ago. The flaw lead in the ice, going from north to southeast, almost touching Victoria Island, is getting larger. At the southeastern tip the flaw lead is extending and curving towards the west. It seems that the wind tries to push the ice out of the Amundsen Gulf. Both the helicopter observations and the satellite images show that the ice is moving a lot. Together with many break ups, it makes the sea ice unpredictable. That’s the reason that the captain prefers to let the ship stay in the ice.
Right now, the ship is attached to the sea ice. And because the ice is always moving depending on the wind, we are also floating with about a kilometer per hour. I don’t know where.
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Onboard the Amundsen
I graduated in physics and philosophy and I hold a PhD in physics. I love writing and I love science, so I decided to combine both. After my PhD, I have worked 3,5 years as a science journalist for the Dutch popular scientific monthly magazine Natuur & Techniek. Since October 2002 I work as a freelance science journalist in a broad field: physical sciences and mathematics, geosciences, neuroscience, and technology. That’s the great thing of working as a science journalist: if you are truly interested in some topic, you can report about it. I have written a few hundred articles for various magazines and newspapers, four books, and I have participated in more than hundred radio programmes explaining science to a broad audience in the Netherlands. Science and travel are for me excellent ways to discover the world around us and even the world inside us. One of my mottos is that science is culture too.