I got up fairly early, and took the salinities for a slew of samples. After I did a lot of the filtering, I left to go out on the ice. Mr. Buckley wanted to finish up the filtering and get the samples into the fridge, so I went out with Terry, Bill, and Pete to get some ice. Bill and I did all the drilling for the stakes that ROV was supposed to find, and Terry and Pete drilled cores. I mentioned to Pete that it might be a good idea to get some algae, because there was some nice blobs floating between the ice and boat -- which he later did.
We
broke for lunch, our work on the ice being done, and
went
back onto the loading platform. Inside, we were fortunate enough to watch
Lance operate the ROV under the stakes that we left out on the ice. The
algae under the ice was the best I've ever seen in my life. Melosira strands
five feet long, dipping and swaying as the ROV zoomed past. It was a regular
upside-down forest, the brownish green algae formed great tentacles the
would ominously appear in the camera's lens.
Long after the ROV, I went to go watch some box-cores. The box-cores are well represented by their name, since they are essentially boxes that they take cores with. They send the box down into the depths of the Arctic Ocean, and it takes a cube of the bottom back up. When they opened it up, water sprayed everywhere, and they dug their hands into the mud, getting samples. They had some clear plastic cylinders that captured the strata of the mud, and they also filled a lot of bags with sediment. Lisa was kind enough to give me a small sample of the sediment, so I could get it to my grandmother whose hobby is looking at diatoms. That was the summation for that day.