It is a surreal atmosphere for me: the sun does not set, the compass does not mark the north (the magnetic pole is located apart from the geographic pole), the seascape sometimes is punctuated by ice blocks, sometimes is a vast expanse of ice, and sometimes is open sea. Then suddenly far in the ocean a white splash rises from the waves and a beluga whale takes a breath of fresh air. Or in the middle of the ice you see a seal peeping its head out, then climbing on a slab of ice, and finally simmering in the sun.
I am on the Canadian icebreaker Amundsen undertaking arctic research at approximately 70 degrees North in the Beaufort Sea, cruising off Banks Island, between Franklin Bay and Darnley Bay.
I am here, in this incredible place so far away and so different from the panoramas of my homeland, to observe the research underway as one of the winner of the Amundsen Competition organized by the World Federation of Science Journalists. A group of about 40 researchers, coming from Canada and from several countries, actively works here even 16 hours per day to study the delicate arctic ecosystem.


Searching underneath the ice
On Saturday, a team of researchers went down on the ice (now full of water pools) for the last time. It is really weird to walk on this thin crust of ice laid on the surface of the ocean and to cross broad extents of shallow water, 20-to-30 centimetres deep, without knowing if underneath the surface there would be solid translucent ice or just water. When we were at 500 metres from the ship the researchers started collecting data and samples. The scuba diver Haakon Hop of the Norsk Polarinstitutt went into the cold water from an opening in the ice, dipping tens of times to collect samples of zooplankton in different locations and to measure the solar radiation that penetrates underneath the ice pack. Some researchers extracted ice carrots to study the microscopic life within and others measured the solar radiation absorbed and reflected (albedo), to estimate its contribution to the melting of the ice pack. Sunlight, on the summer solstice, is actually much dazzling and I had to use a sun protection cream, also under the tip of the nose, where it is easy to get a sunburn because of the reflected light.

Collecting samples
Once the samples are collected and the measurements completed on the pack or in the open sea, through special equipment like the rosette (a rack of 24 bottles that open and close automatically at predefined depths) or special nets for zooplankton and sediments, researchers work inside the laboratories of the ship. These activities, in conjunction with other studies already completed or under way in other regions of the arctic, aim at understanding the uncertain balance of this environment still vastly unexplored. The sampling made through the rosette allows also the detection of viruses, bacteria, and various contaminants. At these latitudes there is still a great amount of viruses (about 3 millions in every millilitre of water), that can infect several species.

Fishing for zooplankton
Stephane Thanassekos, PhD student of Laval University (Québec) focusing on zooplankton, explains that he studies organisms of a few millimetres, like copepods, which eat microscopic algae and feed fish and larger marine organisms. He measures their concentrations at several levels of depth and solar light intensity in order to understand how they would respond to the reduction of the arctic ice cap. He studies also the arctic cod, a species that reaches only 20 centimetres of length at maturity (12-13 years). Arctic cods are basically the most important link in the food chain between zooplankton, which they feed on, and animals living on the surface such as gulls or other arctic birds, seals and polar bears that, in turn, eat them. It is a creature of slow movements and slow growth, well accustomed to cold climate as it takes shelter in tunnels dug into the ice pack. Knowing this fish well is crucial for understanding if it will be able to adapt to a changing habitat and how this will affect the food chain. With the progressive shrinking of the arctic ice towards areas closer and closer to the pole, the arctic cod is expected to move north, because the areas without ice will be occupied by more competitive fishes from temperate zones that will probably upset its ecosystem.

Looking for phytoplankton
Eva Alou Font, PhD student of the University of Québec at Rimouski, studies the behaviour of phytoplankton, microscopic algae of various colours, whose abundance depends on the amount of nutriment, which changes from place to place depending on temperature, solar radiation intensity, and depth. Phytoplankton is the base of the food chain and it is an important bioindicator used to monitor the health of the environment.

Studying carbon dioxide
It is also important to understand how much the arctic is capable of absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Elizabeth Shadwick, PhD student of Dalhousie University (Nova Scotia), explains that a gas transfer between air and ocean is controlled by the pressure difference of the gas in the two atmospheres and by the boundary conditions at the air-water interface. As an example, if the concentration of CO2 is higher in air, CO2 will tend to flow into the ocean and waves, ripples, foam films or ice floes will determine the transfer speed. Inside of the ocean, CO2 concentration depends on all biological organisms, water circulation, temperature, and salinity. The arctic tends to absorb carbon dioxide because cold water dissolves more gas and the photosynthesis activity of phytoplankton in spring is usually faster then the respiration of marine organisms. In reality things are much more complex, because the arctic sea functions also as a link between two oceans, mixing the waters of the Pacific, older and richer of carbon dioxide, with the younger Atlantic waters. Here the thermohaline circulation closes the loop after circling the planet in about a century. The research conducted during this mission should give the most detailed picture ever taken about how much carbon dioxide is absorbed in the arctic, with particular attention to the role of the superficial ice layer, whose function is still unclear.

What is next?
The progressive melting of the arctic ice pack, more apparent in this season, will result for example in the loss of part of the population of arctic bears, seals, and walruses, that need solid ice platforms on which resting, giving birth and bringing up the offspring. Moreover the delicate equilibrium among several species well adapted to extreme conditions is destined to change. This part of the world with such a wild nature and extreme weather, with perennial ice that is inevitably melting, must be studied before it is too late, in order to understand more about the ongoing climate change, which affect the polar regions the most, and to find ways to mitigate it.

Maria Maggi
Science Editor for L'Osservatore Romano
Rome, Italy

Ice diary: Science in the fast-changing Arctic

Liz Kalaugher reports from the High Arctic as she travels aboard the Amundsen. She has joined an expedition investigating the effects of climate change off Banks Island.

SUNDAY 22 JUNE: FUELLING UP

Overnight, we've moved to Summer Harbour, where the ship spends all day taking on fuel from the barge that's been moored here since last summer. There's still plenty of ice around near the coast and it helps to keep the barge steady as we moor alongside.
The captain has issued strict instructions for the scientists to tidy up their labs onboard. They need to tie down all their glassware ready for when the ship goes out on the open water. The refuelling means there's no data collection going on today, so it's an ideal time for a clean-up.





Yves Gratton of the University of Quebec is also taking the opportunity to move his rosette - a piece of kit for taking water samples - into place for the open water.

Until now, the rosette has been operating through the moon pool, an opening in the ship's hull that enables scientists to put instruments into the water even when the ship is surrounded by ice.
With its cylindrical arrangement of 25 12-litre sample bottles, the equipment is strangely reminiscent of bullets in a revolver chamber. From now on, it will be winched over the side of the boat into the sea to the required depth.
The rosette is one of the most important pieces of kit on the boat as many of the project teams need samples of water. They'll use them to look at factors such as nutrient levels, contaminant concentrations, the amount of plankton, and the levels of gases dissolved in the water.
Gas levels could provide information about how much of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide the ocean is currently removing from the atmosphere; there are concerns that climate change itself is reducing the amount that the ocean can absorb.
The teams share samples from the rosette and there are strict rules for who gets to take their water from the sample bottle first. The scientists looking at gas levels are first in the pecking order as once water is taken from the bottles, oxygen gets in and could affect their readings.
Meanwhile, entertainment on board the ship continues. Last night was one of the three nights a week the bar is open, and this morning saw a yoga class in the officers' mess.

SATURDAY 21 JUNE: WADING THROUGH MELT POOLS

Last night, we were surrounded by coastal fast ice attached to the land. But that ice has begun to break up and we're now drifting along with it towards the north-west.
The low winds forecast for tomorrow make it an ideal day to refuel the Amundsen from the barge that was moored nearby last summer and has been trapped in the ice all winter. So today is likely to be the last chance for heading out on the ice as soon it won't be thick enough to walk on safely.
It's an eerie feeling wading into the melt pools that are starting to appear on the surface of the ice. Somehow it doesn't hit you that you're standing on the sea, on ice just a metre thick, until you start stepping through water.
I spend the afternoon with a team investigating whether the melt pools change how much light passes through the ice.
Light affects both what type of organisms can live below and also how much energy enters the water, Andrea Rossnagel of the University of Manitoba tells me.

The scientists drilled two holes in the ice on either side of a melt pool and passed a rope between them. Then Haakon Hop of the Norwegian Polar Institute dived under the ice through a hole that a seal created earlier and measured the amount of light getting through at metre intervals along the length of the rope.
Having spent more than an hour in sub-zero temperature water, Haakon sprinted around the ice to warm up, before returning to the depths to take samples of water for his own work on zooplankton - tiny sea creatures that feed on algae and floating plant cells.

Not much is known about the concentrations of zooplankton just below the ice as it's hard to sample that close to the surface without diving. Although the Amundsen has a "moon pool" that researchers can use to access open water from inside the boat when it's surrounded by ice, they can't start to take measurements until a few metres below the surface.
Meanwhile, Debbie Armstrong of the University of Manitoba, drilled cylindrical samples of ice to measure the amount of harmful substances that might be present, such as mercury; while Stephane Thanassekos of Laval University cast a net about 20m (66ft) down through the seal hole to look for fish larvae.
He didn't find any today but a few weeks ago, they were plentiful.

FRIDAY 20 JUNE: BREAKING THE ICE

I'm travelling now with fellow journalist Maria Maggi from Italy and researchers Zheng Shaojun and Chen Zhihua from the Oceans University of China, who I meet up with in Inuvik.
This morning our journey hits a snag - it's too foggy for us to fly out to the Amundsen for the first part of the day so we wait at Inuvik airport for about six hours.

Apparently, the large amounts of open water around the ship at this time of year can lead to fog. But in Inuvik after a cloudy start, it's bright, sunny and around 10C (50F). Tomorrow brings the solstice and the town will be hosting a half-marathon that kicks off at midnight, making full use of the current 24-hour-long daylight.
Jim from Aklak Air, a company owned by the Inuit community, stows our bags inside the Twin Otter, carefully avoiding the glass window in the floor which can be used to take pictures during aerial surveys.
And then we wait.
When it finally comes round, the trip out to the Amundsen is amazing. As we head further north, there are fewer and fewer trees as it becomes too cold for them to thrive. The landscape looks increasingly barren before finally becoming bare rock near the coast.
We see the ice that's still in place along the coastline before flying out over a stretch of open water to get our first glimpse of the Amundsen, moored in ice in Franklin Bay. A few hardy scientists are visible out on the ice nearby.

Earlier in the year, planes could land next to the ship but the ice is now too thin for that. So we head to a bleak gravel airstrip at Cape Parry. The strip was built to service a DEW station - part of an early warning radar system set up during the Cold War. There's basically nothing there other than a runway and the DEW station hidden behind a hill. The wind makes it feel pretty chilly even though it's about 3C (37F).
From the airstrip, the Amundsen's helicopter whisks us to the icebreaker in just a few minutes.
It's great to meet the 40 scientists on board at their nightly planning meeting and to sample the ship's excellent, and much commented on, carrot cake. And it's the first time I've been able to see ice and seals from my bedroom window.

THURSDAY 19 JUNE: HEADING NORTH

Just one flight into my epic six-flight trip to join the Amundsen icebreaker in the Canadian Arctic and I had already seen a polar bear. Admittedly, it was made of plastic and a little closer than I'd like to get to any real ones I come across during the next week, but I'm taking it as a good omen.
I'm heading north to join 40 researchers on board a ship that's on loan from the Canadian Coast Guard. In a project for International Polar Year (IPY), the scientists are investigating the effects of climate change off Banks Island.

The project is focusing on the circumpolar flaw lead - a region where a gap forms between the fast ice that stays fixed to the coastline and the more mobile sea ice. The presence of open water brings the flaw lead unique properties. It's a great habitat for wildlife and an ideal place for scientists to study the effects of climate change on both ecosystems and the ocean itself.
But before I can find out more about the science, I must continue my journey to Inuvik - a town of 3,000 people in Canada's far north. Following a spot of souvenir-browsing at Edmonton's departures lounge - where the specialities are moose fur slippers and jewellery made from fossil mammoth ivory - I fly to Yellow Knife, Norman Wells and then Inuvik. The seemingly obligatory airport polar bears become more realistic as I head north: the one at Yellow Knife is stuffed and pretending to catch a seal, while Inuvik's bear is both stuffed and standing on its back legs roaring threateningly.
In Inuvik I meet Liz Gordon, regional co-ordinator for the Amundsen project, who tells me about some of the signs of climate change she's experienced. It's hard for Inuit people to predict the condition of the ice these days, which makes travelling across it difficult and dangerous.

"We can't take chances on that ice any more; it doesn't go as solid as it used to," she said. Indeed, according to Liz's colleague, Stephanie Meakin, some communities have gone back to using dogs for transport rather than snowmobile, as dogs will sense where the ice is dangerously thin and refuse to cross it.
Last summer, the extent of sea-ice across the Arctic reached a record low, and predictions for this year aren't looking too promising either.
Liz says the wildlife is changing as well as the ice. Last summer, grasshoppers arrived in Inuvik for the first time on record. And a polar bear was seen on the Dempster Highway, 600km (370 miles) further south than its usual coastal habitat.
In a part of the project dubbed "the two ways of knowing", Inuit communities are sharing their traditional knowledge about wildlife and ice conditions with scientists. In return, the researchers are providing predictions about how the climate will change in the future. This could help the communities to plan how they can try to adapt to climate change.
Tomorrow I'll join the scientists on board and find out how well the acupressure wrist band I've bought to combat seasickness really works.
Dr Liz Kalaugher is the editor of Environmental Research Web, an Institute of Physics publication that keeps its readers up to date on a range of environmental topics from around the globe

Exquisite Shades of Blue in Leg 8b and 9a
By: Andrea Rossnagel
Team 2, Sea Ice, University of Manitoba, lead by David Barber

Well, I’ve now seen all the stages of sea ice with my very own eyes. I keep reading about all of these processes and now I’ve finally seen them, quite exciting! My first leg on the Amundsen was leg 1 when the ship left Quebec City. It was quite lifting to see everybody along the shore waving to us as we sailed away. We traveled along the St.Laurence River, into some beautiful fjords along Labrador, down the Hudson Strait and around the south side of Hudson Bay to Churchill. The only ice seen on this trip was some icebergs floating down along the coast.

In the zodiac doing a water profile with the Satlantic HyperOCR

I then came back for leg 7 which was from March 13 to April 24 and it was much different. We flew out and landed on a landing strip made on the ice and there was ice everywhere. It was pretty cold at times and the daylight lasted longer and longer every day. By the time we left the ship at the end of April, there was 20 hours of daylight.
I am part of Team 2, the sea ice team so we spent many hours out on the ice taking and processing ice cores, sampling snow, doing light profiles under the ice as well as CTDs (conductivity, temperature, depth). My project is looking at the light field under different ice, snow and water conditions. This is important because the range of light that I research is what ice algae and phytoplankton in the water column use to grow.

My favorite pastime, drilling little holes

I like coming back to the ship since I always get to work with the same coast guard crew and there are many familiar faces among the scientists as well. There is always someone with a smiling face in the hallway with a good morning, hello or bon nuit. And when you go for a snack in the kitchen late at night/early morning there will probably still be someone else up working as well.

**Multiyear ice on the west side of Banks Island
**In the cage doing a PAR (photosynthetically active radiation) profile for Eva

I came back to the Amundsen May 15 and I will be here until June 26 and now there is 24 hour daylight. It is now 1 am and I just looked out the window and it is bright and sunny so I told the officer on the bridge that it would be great to get out sampling. He then told me to go downstairs that is was nighttime and I should go to bed. I spend my days drilling little holes in the ice and lowering down my instruments to 60 metres then reeling them back up. I figured if I kept up all this manual drilling, reeling and hauling of equipment cases I could fit into, my arms might grow larger than three inches across but after daily examination, not much of an increase. The weather feels so hot this leg at a balmy +2°C. I put on sunscreen at least three times a day. My face will have a pretty good tan but the rest of me will be whiter than ever since my face is the only part of me that ever sees the sun. Not sure how this will look when I get home at the end of June and put on shorts and a t-shirt.

One highlight of my trip was being able to work on multiyear ice. It was the most exquisite colour of blue, so pure. Now someday when I have grandkids I can say back in the day your grandmother worked on a thing called multiyear ice. I drilled down four metres to be able to get to the water to do a profile. Not quite the same as drilling a few feet through the ice on Lake Manitoba to go ice fishing. Does anyone in Manitoba own an extension for an ice auger, let alone three or four? Pretty crazy. I am also quite thrilled to be involved in the dive program. The colour of the melt ponds now is such a beautiful blue. Now, if it would only stop getting my pants and boots soaked with that beautiful blue many times a day. We also have one dwarf tomato plant from Winnipeg growing on the ship. Not sure, but I might guess it may be the first tomato plant to grow on an icebreaker.
All in all, great trips, learnt a lot, met really great people scientists and crew, and saw some really amazing sites. Going to miss it. Who knew a farm kid from a tiny town in Manitoba would end up studying sea ice in the Arctic?

From chaotic Delhi to the calm Arctic...

The day I left New Delhi ten days ago, the temperature was 40 degrees Celsius. Normally, around this time of the year, the maximum temperature in the Indian capital reaches about 44 degrees. So, comparatively this summer has been less harsh so far. When I wrote in my first dispatch from the icebreaker that the temperature here was freezing cold, some crew members and scientists told me the next day 'it's not so cold here. Why did you write it is so cold'. Certainly it was not cold out here when you have been through -30 and -40! But for someone coming from India, a drop of nearly 40 degrees in temperature would certainly be cold. That was the only way I could relate the Arctic environment to my readers back home.
The past ten days have been the most peaceful (and pollution-free) days in my life, despite the hectic scientific activity going on all around. Coming from Delhi, which has 5.5 million vehicles that emit tonnes of carbon and millions of decibels of noise into the environment every hour, the life in the Arctic is heavenly. This also makes me connect the two worlds – the carbon emissions from fast growing countries like India, China as well as the developed world and the rapid changes taking place in the Arctic. The connection is really deep and direct. It was an eye-opening experience to see how rapidly the Arctic ecology is changing.
For the first time in my over two decades' career as a science journalist, the CFL project has provided me an opportunity to witness climate change right at the moment when it is happening. For the past two days, the icebreaker has had to change its course in view of the breaking fast ice. I have written a lot about the Himalayan glaciers melting, but have never seen one melting in first person. I have been able to report about the Arctic ice melting and give a first-hand account of the dramatic change right from CCGS Amundsen. Must thank CFL and WFSJ for this great opportunity.

Dinesh C Sharma
Science Editor, Mail Today
India

Aalok Mehta
Writer / Editor, National Geographic News

It's fitting that my time on the Amundsen is ending as much of the remaining fast ice in Darnley Bay crumbles away in the summer heat and winds. My primary reason for coming to the ship, after all, was the chance to observe climate change (and the researchers studying it) firsthand, in the region of the world where it is happening the fastest.

There is nothing especially unusual about the speed of this particular
breakup, which literally happened overnight, with the ship calmly
parked in the fast ice in the evening and drifting in a newly formed
ice floe by morning. Ice disintegration is typically a quick process,
says David Hirschberg of Stony Brook University, who is aboard the
Amundsen to study oceanic carbon exchange.

But there is a lesson in the timing of the event. Depending on the
particular estimate, the ice in Darnley Bay is breaking up three weeks
to two months ahead of schedule, in large part because of a massive
melt last summer that caused the winter ice to form much later and
much thinner than it usually does.

It's one of the most important of the many enlightening experiences I
have had on the ship, since a particular difficulty with covering
climate change is making it concrete and tangible to readers. Despite
its alarming pace (in geologic timescales), global warming is still a
far removed and mostly abstract concept for many people, and even the
majority of my own reporting in the area has come through the
relatively depersonalized realm of research papers, conference
presentations, and satellite data. Now, in a very real sense, I've
seen climate change with my own eyes, and I've talked with dozens of
scientists from one of the most ambitious research projects in the
world attempting to unravel its effects on a systematic level

Those conversations will, of course, help make my coverage of the
Arctic specifically more accurate, informed, and insightful - and, for
better or worse, the rapid changes in the region mean it will be
featured in many stories in the coming years. But my time aboard the
Amundsen has also provided me with greater knowledge of just how
intricate the systems being affected are and how difficult it is to
decipher these processes while they are in the midst of such quick
transitions - common themes of all global warming research. That
should help whenever it comes time to write about climate change -
whether its desertification in Africa, drought in Australia, or
catastrophic flooding in Polynesia.

‘From the Freezer to the Frying Pan’

I lay in bed and blearily open my eyes. . . . OH NO IT’S BROAD DAYLIGHT! Did I miss the alarm? Have I missed my water collection from the rosette? I was supposed to be on the ice at 8 am, more importantly. . . have I missed breakfast??
My weary eyes glare searchingly at the clock. . . 3:30!!! I haven’t slept in this late since I was an undergraduate student . . .
Realisation slowly sets in. . . . the Arctic summer! Oh yeah, right, the sun never sets (I can hear my supervisor right now “Ah, the perfect environment for a PhD student, no need to go to bed. . . keep working Tom”). Sorry Guillaume, back to sleep and happy dreams of breakfast.

So this is what midnight looks like in the Arctic!!

This is my second trip to what now feels like ‘home’. I was fortunate enough to be on Leg 7 of the CFL project in March and April and experience the Arctic as we all picture it. Clear blue skies, bitterly cold with temperatures reaching -40oC with 30 knot winds, ice gluing your eyelids together, occasional snow flurries, polar bears, Arctic foxes, skidoos and all that cool stuff that makes this place so special. Now, here I am just weeks later and I find myself needing, rather than my furry deerstalker, a sun hat and factor 30 sunscreen. What has happened to my crisp white majestic Arctic? Can I not leave for just six weeks without everything going to pot? Apparently not it would seem.

Leg 7, March/April -40oC________________________________Leg 9, June/July +10oC

Just a matter of weeks ago stepping into the -20 lab was considered. . . ‘quite pleasant’ now the -20 lab seems positively freezing! According to regular visitors to this region this has occurred much quicker than in past years. So is all this a result of global warming is the question we always get bombarded with. . . well, let me just say I am here with the expectation of sea ice, as are we all, but that started to vanish from under our feet back in leg 7 way ahead of schedule. So the evidence WAS under our noses, but has since melted! Make of that what you will.
Ice or no ice, this place is still pretty damn special.

Thomas Brown, University of Plymouth, United Kingdom.

Dispatch: June 9, 2008 (Leg 9|A)

Measurement of ocean surface roughness over the melting ocean

I am on Amundsen again. My name is Mukesh Gupta and I am a doctoral student at University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. I work with Dr. David Barber in Team 2. I was on the ship before, during autumn freeze up and winter periods and this time I will be monitoring the changing patterns of ocean surface roughness due to summer melting.

Assume a situation where there are no waves, no turbulence in the ocean and it is only a planer surface, what would happen? Of course, no Ph.D.! I was kidding! There will be Ph.D. on planer surfaces then. The roughness of the surface is a direct manifestation of the turbulence that occurs at the ocean-sea ice-atmosphere interface. Roughness is not only rendered by the dynamic forces but also due to the thermodynamic forces. Among the dynamic factors ocean surface winds and ocean surface waves are major factors and those among thermodynamic factors, the gas mass exchange across the ocean-sea ice-atmosphere interface and lateral heat transfer are main factors.

There are a number of ways in which the roughness of a surface can be estimated. It is a relative word. I am estimating roughness on two scales: one local smaller scale and second regional larger scales. The small scale roughness can be estimated by laser altimetry methods and back scattering using scatterometers. Larger scale roughness can be estimated using satellite based methods such as space-borne laser systems and QuickSCAT, NSCAT etc. It gives roughness on the scale of 25 km pixel size. The larger scale roughness is very useful in studying the thermodynamics of the ocean-sea ice-atmosphere interface. The smaller scale roughness can also be used to develop algorithms for better estimation of geophysical sea ice parameters from space based remote sensing.

During this leg, I am also deploying the meteorological ocean buoys (MET Buoys) in the open water area and beside the edge of the fast ice and Open Ocean to get the ocean wave spectrum. So, I will have synchronous measurements of laser derived roughness, scatterometer based roughness and ocean wave spectrum data.

I am using a prototype laser instrument designed for estimating the ocean wave slope. I am experimenting with this instrument on the sea ice and detection of ripples in the melt ponds and snow pack. The laser instrument works at 900 nm wavelengths and, along with it, I am also using data on passive microwave emissions of the surface and back scattering using a C-band scatterometer. I would like to correlate the roughness estimates of laser method with the satellite derived ocean surface roughness using GLAS mission of NASA.

Thanks for looking in....

Mukesh Gupta

Spending one week on board the CCGS Amundsen has been a humbling, inspiring, and altogether amazing experience for me. It has been a great privilege, too – not even Nature’s science reporters often get to see spots as grandiose and pristine as the Canadian Arctic.

Change comes faster to this unique environment than most of us would have thought ten or twenty years ago. With climate change and global warming proceeding at an unexpected pace, it seems doubtful now if we can preserve even to the next generation the Arctic as we knew it.

It is important that scientists bring this unconvenient truth to the attention of decision-makers and to the world’s public. It is equally important that scientists understand the complexity of changes in the Arctic and what they may bring about. Without this detailed knowledge any strategy of mitigation or adaptation will all too easily fail.

From everything I have seen during my short stay, from the commitment, enthusiasm and hard work of everybody I have met here, I have no doubt that the CFL study will very substantially add to this knowledge. My week on board the Amundsen has certainly widened my own understanding of this fragile environment.

I have ben keeping a diary during my visit which you can read here:



Quirin has posted some of his photos here:



Many thanks to David Barber, Dan Leitch, the Canadian Coast Guard, all CFL scientists, and the amazing Amundsen crew, for having made this possible.

Quirin Schiermeier
Science reporter
Nature

Scientific diving under fast melting sea ice

By Haakon Hop, Norwegian Polar Institute, Tromsø, Norway

The fast ice in Darnley Bay of the Amundsen Gulf is now melting fast under the 24 hours of bright Arctic sunlight. We get all our dive gear ready and go to our dive site in a skippy boat, which can drive on the ice and through melt-ponds by means of a larger propeller at its rear. Previously, we have cut a dive hole through the 1.6 m of fast ice. Then a tent is put on top of it to make a shelter when we are out of the water, although in this situation more to prevent getting sun burnt than anything. As the first diver, I clip into the dive line and jump into the -1.7 °C water. My thick neoprene dive suit prevents me from getting cold, but at the end of a 1 hour dive it can be quite chilly, particularly on the fingers.

Above is now the ice and below the deep blue ocean to bottom at 80 m. I get a great feeling of being suspended in space, but keep checking my dive line to make sure I am still attached, because there is no way that I can find my way back to the dive hole if I lose the line. We also now dive with communications, so that I can talk with my line man, Dave, in my full-face dive mask, although it is not that easy to talk with a mouth piece in the way.

My first task is the measure light below a melt pond with a light-meter, at 23 positions. Then, I measure the elevation of the melt pond dome below the ice with a metre stick. I note the 15-20 cm thick layer of melt water below the ice as well as 10 cm long platelets of ice sticking down below. This is a sign of a rapid melting process. The layer of ice algae that once covered the underside of the ice is long gone, but some amphipods – a crustacean with name Onisimus glacialis, are still huddled together in brine channels. I can see them as orange spots in the ice, and use my electrical suction pump to get them out. We sample them for contaminant studies of mercury and persistent organic pollutants and also study their feeding habits. What do they feed on once their staple food, the ice algae, is gone? They will basically feed on any dead matter, often referred to a detritus. I try to get some quantitative samples of them by means of square frames that I suck out with my electrical vacuum cleaner, but the critters are very patchily

Line tender Dave waiting for his Norwegian ice diver. Photo: H. Hop


Ice platelets and melt layer below the sea ice. Photo: H. Hop

distributed in very low abundance, so the final values per m2 will be very low.
My air supply is getting low, so time to get back to the dive hole to the reception committee of line tender, standby diver, sample handler and safety officer with gun to protect us from potential white visitors.

Diver team ready to go in the skippy boat to the dive hole.
From left: Jeremy Stewart, David Barber and Haakon Hop
Photo: H. Hop

So, what brought two federal public servants from Ottawa to the CCGS Amundsen for one week as part of Leg 9 of the Circumpolar Flaw Lead System Study (CFL)?

Well, in February 2008 the Government of Canada announced the replacement of the CCGS Louis S. St. Laurent. This new Polar Class Icebreaker is anticipated to be in service in 2017 and will provide a platform to conduct marine, environmental, geological and hydrographic science activities. We work for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada in the Science Sector. We came onboard to observe and experience firsthand the multidisciplinary Arctic Science research occurring on this dedicated science vessel. We have spent our days watching and talking to the science staff learning more about the research they are conducting as well as sharing ideas and suggestions about how to improve laboratory space, configuration, location, and how research equipment is deployed and retrieved. In addition, we have been discussing their anticipated future requirements. The integration of these diverse science activities with varying laboratory and technical requirements found onboard the CCGS Amundsen is truly remarkable.

Though our time onboard is short, the knowledge we have gathered will be extremely useful in helping to shape the new Polar Class Icebreaker requirements for science. Though this vessel replacement project is at the initial planning stages, the contacts we have made and the information we have gathered will be invaluable throughout the project. We sincerely appreciate the time that the science staff and Canadian Coast Guard personnel have taken to speak with us given their demanding schedules – Thank you!

Jennifer Nield and Andrea Raper

Tatiana Pichugina
5 June
Today I am leaving North Territories for Winnipeg. Seating in the Inuvik airport café it’s time to summarize my impressions of the week aboard the icebreaker. The most striking news for me was the reality of Arctic warming, strange as it could sound. Like many people around the globe I’ve heard about this phenomenon before and I am pretty well aware of the climate change. As a science reporter I covered this topic many times and followed the news in this field of science and policy. But all this was bookish knowledge like many other knowledge I had and used in my life. For example I can write about space biological experiments or an underwater oil platform although I have never seen any. The same was with the climate change problem before this expedition. But after I spent a week in the Arctic ice it became something real for me.
I was told that Arctic ice had dramatic changes in recent times, that it was warming up much quicker then other regions, that probably in 2007 years the critic point for Arctic region was passed after that its changes became irreversible, that we had never seen the same Arctic again, that IPCC experts used old models for their reports and that changes should be more dramatic. If honestly I became nervous – it is a little comfort to know that you live at the beginning of the global catastrophe and that you will see its consequences with your own eyes. As I understand we can do nothing to stop ice melting, this process is beyond our power already. It is still a tiny chance to diminish the atmosphere warming a little bit and to give our biosphere some time to adapt with new habitat. In my opinion we should take this chance. Reducing greenhouse emissions is expensive but surviving the catastrophe would be many times more expensive.

Tatiana Pichugina
4 June

The CFL-project is the biggest scientific project ever launched in Canada, it is also the biggest and the most expensive in all activities under International Polar Year. It is a shame that I didn’t hear about anything similar launched in Russia during IPY. The last year expedition to North pole and the flag raising organized by Arthur Chilingarov is not counted. However, it got big international coverage it had more to do with sport and politics then with science. But come back to the Amundsen.
The biggest scientific project set on the hottest planetary problem that humanity faced ever – climate change. Everybody expects to find the icebreaker heavily packed with famous academics and senior researches trying to solve the mystery of dramatic Arctic ice melting. Nothing like that at all. What I see is a big modern laboratory for students from around the world where they could do all experiments by themselves. Per about 40 students there are 4-5 senior scientists including the chief Dave Barber whose supremacy is shown only during short evening meetings. And in my opinion, this is one of the most important features of the expedition. Self-organizing mass of students look at the Amundsen as if it is their own habitat. Every one of them knows what task to perform, everyone is on the right place and in time. From 9 a.m. until 19.30 like red bees they seat on the ice collecting great number of samples and later analyzing some of them in labs aboard. Moreover, some people make seawater temperature measurements all day long, every 3 ours, day and night. No one is afraid of cold: plus 2 C - is it really a cold? “You’d see how I did it under minus 50 C” – says Rod drilling a wide hole for sediment collectors and drawing ice crumbs by bare hands. The team of scientists is rotating every month as well as the ship crew but it always consists mostly from students. Let’s count – for an expedition year we have about 480 students being aboard the Amundsen. Most of the data obtained in the expedition will be used for their Ms and PhD projects. Thanks to CFL-project all they get precious Arctic experience and have the possibility to work for the actual problem of nowadays. In other words, right now on the Amundsen a whole generation of new researches is going to form.

June 4th

From the womb to the sky: two views of the Arctic

One can easily wonder what life is on an ice breaker. Well, it’s not boring at all. At least for a journalist that spends seven days on one of them – the bar is friendly, the lobby is always a place to laugh, the food is good (I would never have imagined so many nice things could be aboard: shrimps, scallops, roasted and smoked ducks, good steaks, etc..)

As it is sometimes hard to find a little space just for yourself (except when on the ice...), I understand that some researchers would think different than me after six or even twelve weeks onboard. As the 8th Leg ends tomorrow (June 5th), most of them, and the Amundsen crew as well, are happy to go back home to Winnipeg or Québec, where the weather forecasts annouce a beautiful 30°C. One of those happy ones is definitely Vincent Grondin, chief engineer onboard the Amundsen, who bought a Piper plane three monthes ago and cannot wait any longer to fly it again. But before leaving, he agrees to give me a tour of the engine room, which is the original one and dates from 1979 with the Amundsen.

My first impression is that it is almost unbelievable that there is so much space in the womb of the ship. It’s loudy, ok, but it is much cooler than expected. “It’s like a small town, so Grondin. We produce our own drinking water from the sea, our electricity trough a huge generator, the heat of course, and we have a kind of sewage system. The dirty waters are purified in three different reservoirs, one containing degrading bacterias that we feed with air, and the last one sending UV on the waters to kill any germ, before the waters are released in the ocean.”
But the most impressive are of course the engines.

Six Diesel engines producing each 2950 horsepowers are coupled to two electric engines (6800 hp each) that drive the 1.6 meters tall propellers at the rate of 160 rounds per minute. With it’s fuel capacity of 2700 cubic meters, it’s hard to say how many nautical miles can be made, as this depends on how much ice the ship as to cross. “In May, we used an average of 12 cubic-meters a day. But once, it reached 35 just to achieve 23 miles (well, almost nothing), as we were stuck in the ice”, says Grondin. He agrees that a fossil fuel ice-breaker is ecologically worse than nuclear one (like the Russian use), as it produces CO2 – not that great on a mission programm studying climate change caused mainly ... by CO2 increase. “But with the latest, you also have to get ride of the nuclear waste, which is not easy at all. And with a Diesel one, we can do best choices to reduce fuel consumption a lot.” One solution is to go on open water.
To know where the channels of open water stand, Captain Stéphane Julien, who runs the Amundsen as easily as a Ferrari, takes most of the days a helicopter ride.

On June 3rd, I was lucky to go on the ride with him.

From the sky, the iceflows look like a puzzle that has be torn appart on a table, and that just waits to be put in place.

As we leave the Amundsen, the ship becomes a reddish dot on the huge white surface decorated with turquoise structures (melt ponds). The impression from the air is just fantastic.

And give a deep feeling of the uniqueness of this region of the world. At that moment, and as the end of my stay on the Amundsen has almost come, I thought of the words of Maïke Kramer,

A german scientist that I interviewed just before, and who is studying the ice meiofauna, that is the small organisms living right inside the ice. A very passionnate PhD student at Kiel University (Germany) who is working very hard to get as many samples of those little beasts as she can (a nematod, that is a worm, is shown in the picture

“You know, she told me, I do the most I can because I take it as a priviledge to document as much as possible those animals right now. Because, who knows, as things are going, there may be no more ice in the Arctic in the next few years. And so this part of biodiversity will have disappeared for ever...”


With this words, I would like to deeply thank the World federation of science journalists and the CFL Project members, especially its leader Dave Barber, to have given me this fantastic opportunity to spend this week on the Amundsen. There will be more articles to come in the daily newspaper I work for in Switzerland (www.letemps.ch). So keep posted!

Olivier Dessibourg
Science Journalist
Le Temps, Geneva

Tatiana Pichugina

Canada is really big and cold country, alike Russia in many ways. No wonder it took me 2,5 days to come to the ship from Moscow. It is my first visit to the icebreaker and the Arctic ice. It strikes me by its power and whiteness that can do you blind. In sunny days it is not possible to look at the ice without protective glasses. I like everything here: to be at the bow and look how the ship is breaking the ice, how the crew is working, how well the ship is equipped, how young and lively scientists are, and the food, especially the food.
There are several things that I tried here for the first time. For example artichokes. Yes, I never eat artichokes and what? In Russia we don’t use this vegetable in our cuisine, you can’t see artichokes in our shops, once I have seen it in a Metro supermarket around 20 euro per 2 artichokes. I am not used to eat “lion de bois” and mussels for diner as well. Not if I eat only potato or bread at home, Russian cuisine is very different and testy (borsch, pirozki, kvas), but I just didn’t expect to find here, on the left-in-the-ice icebreaker such exquisite service. It reminds me of images from XIX century French books. Isn’t it because the Amundsen, all crew and our cook Jean Marc Covillac are from Quebec city? The city that is in a way more French than Paris itself.

Tatiana Pichugina
Science editor of the monthly magazine
Russia, Moscow

This expedition is a unique opportunity for me in several ways: first of all it gives me the possibility to participate in research directly connected to the climate change problem; second: to travel - I am an editor and everybody knows that editors don’t travel they seat in the office all day long and edit others’ people articles and because of that editors become bad and dull. It is exactly my case when I am in the office and edit others people articles. But once I am free from my duties I am a nice and flexible person. This time I managed to cut this bad karma of mine thanks to the World federation of science journalists and its competition.
I have read writings and dispatches left my colleagues and scientists on this website. Everything is so well documented. No tiny detail escaped from people eyes. It is not easy to write something new in this blog after them and I will not even try to do it. Instead I put some of my personal impressions ... may be too personal.
Some people on the Amundsen asks me if I have a scientific background? Because without it it’s not easy to understand what is going on on the ship, what for are all these activities. Yes, I have. About 20 years ago I graduated from the Geological department of the Moscow State University. In 1991 the last thing Russia needed was geologists, especially inexperienced geologists that we were. Almost all my fellows looked for another profession, they became accountants, computer designers, lowers and what not, a few went abroad – to Australia, Germany, Canada, less then a few stayed in science. I soon changed my career too and chose a job where my scientific background was useful – science journalism. I gained a lot from this choice as my nearest future showed.

Two shows at the same time...

After a few unvarying cloudy days, a high pressure front was anounced on the weather forecasts. But in the morning, the skies were still a deceptively gray... That didn’t affect much of the team’s mood, as pretty much all of them are looking forward to seeing the end of this leg coming (on June 5th). But a nice sunshine would certainly give them a new punch of energy for the last three days before they leave the Amundsen.
The ship parked in the fast ice not far from Cap Bathurst, and will stay here for another day. So a all bunch of science stuff was put on the ice. Dave Barber’s group will install a pop-boye that will go up and down in the water every hour to measure again salinity, temperature and depth. This instrument will stay here for weeks, and send its data to a satellite so that scientist will have time series.

Further, another group is putting up a full weather station on a aluminium tower. On starboard side of the Amundsen, Randy Scharien (PhD student, University of Calgary) is instaling a huge radar system on the ice.

“For now, some of the satellites produce images with contrast that can just show structures. But it is sometimes difficult to give them a scientific meaning. So what we are doing here is calibrate all this: the radar sends microwave on the snow covered ice on one side, and on the darker ice covered with turquoise melted snow water on the other side. The waves are then reflected back differently, which gives us a possibility to caracterize what is the physical meaning of the signals we get.”
At the end of day, when most of the science work is done, a team led among other by Roger Memorana, the only Inuit onboard the Amundsen and wildlife monitor, wants to dig a big hole into the ice. Not to fish, even though the food onboard the ship is almost done as we get to the end of the leg... They are digging this 2 square-meters hole for the divers that will join the crew next week, and go for under ice dives in search of algae and different types of planctons that grow under the ice.

But you don’t dig a hole in the ice like you would in the ground: the people first made a perimeter of holes with their coring machine. Then, all the challenge was to take the inner two tones of one meter thick ice out of the hole. After a few hours trying all the possibilities, they finally managed it with the help of the grooming machine.
By that time, around 10 pm, the sun was still lying above the horizon. And would not go down completely, as this region sees now the midnight sun. The yellow and blue colours are fantastic, but also peacefull to look at. That gives the Amundsen a very nice appearance.

I am the only one outside on the decks.

Maybe thats all the scientists have already had enough of these unique moments. I personnaly will never have... But when I got back to my room, I understood the reason why nobody was looking at such a simple but nice spectacle: they were all watching another show, the sixth overtime in the fifth game of the National Hockey League Stanley Cup Final...

Olivier Dessibourg
Science Journalist
Le Temps, Geneva

Hunting for cod larvae

Differently to most of the days, the Amundsen stopped this time right into open the water. Allowing so Jacques Gagné (DFO-IML) and his team to deploy their big nets to try to catch what they are almost desperately looking here for: arctic cod larvae.

“We want to caracterize and describe the populations in this part of the Arctic, says Gagné. As there is here no comercial fishing, there is a huge lack of datas about the abundance and species diversity of fishes. We want to establish what are the best conditions for these fishes to grow in”. And therefore, they try to study it before the climate heating change all the ecosystem here, bringing new fish species coming from southern seas, like the atlantic cod in the Baffin region, or for example salmons not seen before by the locals in the Beaufort.
For some aspects, climate change is not bad for everything. Gagné agrees that with the ice desapearing, this could open new fishing regions that haven’t been exploited until now. “The fishing capacities is already much larger than the demand right now, so Gagné. So, if it is proven that the ressources hear are big, it won’t take long until the fishing companies come here.”
Under the eyes and the microscope of Caroline Bouchard (PhD Student at Univeristé Laval, Montreal), the result of today’s probe are fine, but not extraordinary:

A few arctic cod larvae among a lot of tiny copepods (looking like shrimps with huge antenas) and some small jelly fish.

Not like that day last year when the team did probe at a station were a bank of arctic cod was lying deep in the water: “There were some of them that were stuck in the other science instruments we used. It was for like finding gold in a mine”, recalls Gagné, for who the even bigger problem is not to catch the slow moving larvae, but the adult arctic cod to have a good estimation of the populations.

Olivier Dessibourg
Science Journalist
Le Temps, Geneva

Making holes in the iceflows

What is the influence of climate heating on the dispersion of thermal energy and light on the edges and under the ice-flows ? And what are the consecutive impacts on the ecosystme living right under the ice? Those are, simply put, the basic questions David Barber’s team, professor at the University of Manitoba, and leader of the IPY-CFL project, want to find answers to.
To do that, the best place to work is obviously directly on an ice floe. So on June 1st, we went off on a so-called skippy boat – a flat boat with an engin propulsion not into the water but in the air, like a plane, that can go both on water and ice. Similar ones are used on the waters of the Everglades in Florida.

– in search of the perfect flow for the experiment. Nice and funny ride! Actually, it wasn’t difficult to find one, not far from the mother ship Amundsen. But at all time, Dave reminded me to keep an eye on the neighbouring flows: it doesn’t seem like they move, but they smoothly do. And if they pack together, we might not be able to get back on the water, because of small rifts formed by the collisionning ice flows. “It’s never funny to call the bridge and ask for the helicopter to rescue us because of that”, warns Dave Barber, laughing.
So, on the ice flows, the team formed by Klaus Hochheim and Andrea Rossnagel starts to manually drill small holes in the ice, every three meters starting from the edge, and then only at 30, 60 and 90 meters.

“Because when you’re far from the edge, there’s anyway not so much light anymore”, justifies Dave. Then Andrea would let a CTD instrument slide into the hole, and then down into the water until a depth of 50 meters. This instruments measures conductivity (that is the salinity of water), temperature and depth, but also photosnthetic activity. The goal is to describe the layer structure of water: as the ice melts, more clear water stays on top of the water column, right under the ice, forming a good and well-lit environment for algae to grow in. But the scientists want to caracterize this very precisely, as the melting of ice in the arctic is due to increase.
Meanwhile Andrea is doing her measurements,

Dave and Klaus leave for a while on the skippy boat to do mostly the same kind of experiences, but on the open water this time.

I would stay on the edge at a very precise point, to serve as a distance reference point for them. So, this lets me plenty of time to admire the magnificient landscape as a sunray is coming through the dark clouds on the horizon. Time also to think of how fast I would have to run towards Andrea, more than a hundred meter away, and the only one to have a gun, if a diving polar bear was coming out of the water nearby... I can run fast, but would that be enough, knowing that this mammal can easily run more than 40 km/h?

Olivier Dessibourg
Science Journalist
Le Temps, Geneva

Hello Arctic World...

I am Olivier Dessibourg. As a winner of the World Federation of science journalists’ Amundsen Competition (www.wfsj.org), I have been invited to spend one week on the canadian research ice-braker Amundsen, named after the famous norvegian polar explorer, Roald Amundsen. With Tatiana, a russian journalist, and Dave Barber, the boss of the CFL project (University of Manitoba), the transfert was made on a plane between Inuvik (North West Territories) and Sachs Harbour, on Banks Island. A plane from which, at one point, after two hours of sleep, we saw a small black and smoking dot on the nearby ice. A dream? No, our residence for one week. The Amundsen’s helicopter would finaly bring us on it.

After already two full days onboard, after having tried to fix once for all where all the different steps, rooms and facilities were, and especially after having already taken part into many interesting science activities, I have already plenty things to tell about. First, and not the least, a thought: new may sometimes be beautiful, but not always efficient! Inuvik, where I was supposed to take a plane to somewhere in the Beaufort sea region to come onboard the Amundsen, is certainly at one end of the world. But I would never think I would loose track of my bag in one of the centers of the occidental and modern world, London, more exactly London Heathrow and its brand new but messy Terminal 5... Anyway, after one day running in Edmonton after socks, underpants and trousers, instead of taking the best of Inuvik and the beautiful MacKenzie delta, I was very happy to welcome the kindness of the Amundsen crew, which immediately lent me what I couldn’t find on time. Especially the boots (remember, Benni ... readers: see previous Amundsen blogs)! So, I was almost ready for this fantastic arctic experience. That bloomed for me exactly the next day (May 30th).

As Dave Barber came onboard with me, he immediately wanted things to happen and planned a full day on the ice. It was very interesting to see all this young scientist full of motivation – or was it the cold that made them work fast and efficiently?- do their different jobs: ice coring to get the brown algaes that live stuck in the ice close to the water, measuring the albedo of the ice and snow, getting some water and ice samples in search of microbiological elements, or using a kind of bell to try to measure to fluxes of CO2 between the air and the different snow and ice layers. A lot to try to understand... Like a big puzzle about the big picture of climate change and its impacts in the Arctic that will, I hope, fit in place in seven days as all the projects participants are, in a way, encouraged to work and think together...

Here is a small survey in pictures of who is doing what:

Nicolas-Xavier Geilfus (Universities of Liège and Bruxelles), among others, is trying, by mean of analysis of the air but also ice-cores, to qualify and quantify the fluxes of carbon dioxyde between the Arctic ocean and the atmospher, through the ice. This is important, because until now, all the climate models (including those used in the IPCC report) have not taken into account that such CO2 transfert could talk place

Nathalie Asselin (University of Manitoba), working with Andrea Rossnagel, measures the albedo of the ice-flow, that is the percentage of incomming light that is sent back towards the sky. The albedo for fresh snow, for exemple, is around 90 whereas the albedo from an ocean is very low (less than ten), because the open water is black. It therefore reflects very few of the thermal incomming energy, but instead “eats” it and so gets hotter.

Benoît Philippe (Université du Québec à Rimouski) studies the small algae that live in the lower layers of the ice-flow. Those algaes are the first step in the food chain, as they are eaten by the zooplancton which is then eaten by fishes, which are then eaten by seals, or which may finish onto your plate with a delicious white wine...

Joannie Martin (Université Laval) wants to measure the amout of algae and phytoplancton nutriments in the water at different depth to establish the caracteristics of algae proliferation. For that, she has built a very complex experiment full of tiny tubes that transport the water samples. Being on a ship like the Amundsen doesn’t mean that everything must be kept simple...

Caroline Sevigny (INRS, France) mesures different parametres of the water below the ice from the “moonpool”, a hole made in the bottom of the Amundsen that has direct access to the ice-cold water.

Olivier Dessibourg
Science Journalist
Le Temps, Geneva

If I got to be get here in the Arctic, their is maybe one main reason behind this: my endless passion for sciences. After a master degree in physics and mathematics at the small but familiar and very good University of Fribourg, I hesitated between teaching and doing something else. It was finaly something else, that was in back of my head for a while: explaining to as many people I could science as mysterious, fascinating and at the end as simple as it is. After two years learning the job of journalist at the local newspaper “La Liberté”, I spent two years as the Deputy Head of the Press office for the Swiss national science foundation. Which I left in 2004 to join the daily newspaper “Le TEMPS”, based in Geneva, which is the major french-speaking quality paper in Switzerland. I lead its Science section, and had the priviledge to see my contributions be reproduced in other famous newspapers such as “Le Monde” (France), “Le Soir” (Belgium), “Courrier International” (France), and “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” (Switzerland, german). Winner of different science journalism awards, I love to travel a lot around the world, on the tracks of all the scientist following the most nobel goal ever: try to understand the world we live in.

Olivier Dessibourg
Science Journalist
Le Temps, Geneva

On May 26: for the first time this cruise we went to sample multi-year ice. We are a part of CFL Team 2, studying ice physics. We are about 100 miles west of Banks Island in the Arctic Ocean. On this day we had hoped to sample a combination of first year ice and multi-year, but that was not to be. There is a lot of open water now and the first year ice is almost non-existent here, what remains is thin and dangerous to work on.

As we approached our ice floe we spotted a polar bear walking along the floe edge, it was a big male. The bear looked surprisingly yellow in contrast to the snow. As the ship got closer the bear started to run along the floe edge glancing back at the approaching ship, and finally turned into the floe, disappearing among the ice hummocks and rubble ice. Nice to know that we will have company on the ice, but not to fear, Roger (our local wildlife observer on the ship), is our gunman.

The ship’s Captain did a nice job of parallel parking the ship.

The ship parked parallel to the multiyear floe

We started the EM scanning of the multi-year ice surface from the ship (passive and active microwave), while at the same time readying and then off loading our gear on to the ice. Once we were on the ice, the ship pulled away and resumed its open water research activities, returning in about 3.5 hours.
There were 7 of us on the ice doing various types of sampling mostly in support of the insitu microwave observations which will be used to validate satellite data . Lauren Candlish and Natalie Asselin took ice cores for temperature profiles and a salinity measurements as well as doing snow depth transects. The snow depth transects give us a better idea of the distribution of the snow in the area. Randy Scharien and Klaus Hochheim did snow pits (temperature profiles,

Natalie and Huixiang Xie ice coring

Andrea and Randy measuring snow/ice thickness with Clifford

Snow grain size, density and salinity) and Andrea Rossnagel did CTD and light (PAR) profiles under the ice, hyperspectral downwelling and upwelling irradiance measurements, a snow pit and ice thickness measurements with the red ice pick in tow (affectionately called “Clifford”). These measurements are to be used to characterize the light field under different snow and ice conditions as well as different times of the day. Huixiang Xie (Professor: Univeristy of Quebec) collected ice samples to measure the carbon dioxide content in the ice. Anne Debroise, a visiting journalist, documented some of our activities.
All in all a fairly typical day on the ice.