LONG DAY. I need not say more, but I will. I woke up in the morning, went to the dry-lab, and found Mr. Buckley about to go run chlorophylls on the fluorometer. He was heading to the centrifuge in the geolab when he told me to get the word on ice-ops from Terry. I did as he asked, and Terry said that he was planning on going out in twenty minutes. That obviously wasn't enough time to run the fluorometers, so we postponed that idea, and got in out mustangs. I went to help arrange things as needed, and then came back to the dry-lab to see when Terry wanted to off-load.
As you can imagine, twenty minutes turned out to be two hours of waiting
(and falling asleep once or twice) in the dry-lab. Mr. Buckley and I could
easily had finished the flourometer work in that time, had we known it
was going to take that long. Terry
had originally said that we were going to be off-loaded by crane, but
it turned out that we were to be off-loaded by boat. It worked out smoother
than the last time, but navigation through the ice chunks was difficult.
It didn't matter, though. The day was sunny, and warm. It was too beautiful
to be irritable. When we finally got onto the ice, it was very easy to
start working. The boat crew was off in the distance, wrestling on the
snow, throwing each other into melt-ponds and utilizing their good fortune
of being outside on this fine day.
We were about to run the same operations as we had run previously, with Bill and I on drilling stake holes and taking depths, and Terry, Pete, and Mr. Buckley running cores, but the drill motor broke, and we had to use the core motor for a drill. So, Bill, Pete, and Mr. Buckley drilled, while Terry and I took measurements. We measured the depth of the ice, the depth of the snow on top of the ice, and the "freeboard," or the distance from the surface of the water to the top of the ice. It was rather interesting, because in the melt-ponds we counted the freeboard as a negative value, and obviously no snow depth.
With that done, we took three cores (one for structure, one for Pete,
and one for analysis), and got those arranged. There was really no sediment
whatsoever on the snow, so we just took it easy. The
ROV hadn't made it down yet, and we were told that the entire wet-lab
area had lost power on the ship! That turned out to be a good thing for
us, because they lowered lunch down from the bow, and we got to have a
barbecue out on the snow. It was us, the boat crew, and the bear-watches
-- hamburgers, tator-tots, beans, and chicken wings. It was perfect for
a sunny, warm afternoon. We all took off the tops of our mustangs and
lounged in the sun. We drank the load of Pepsi and coke they had sent
down for us (which saved me fifty cents), and had an incredible time.
Before lunch had happened, though, we had noticed that the part of ice that the bow was parked on wasn't broken, so I got my camera, and others followed. We all got pictures of us touching the hull, standing next to each other under the bow, and even licking the hull (Pete insisted that I get a picture of him licking the hull of the ship). After that, we ate, and soon the power was restored and the ROV came scooting underneath the ice.
We returned to the ship via boat, where I reloaded my camera with my last roll of film, and we took a break from the long ice-station. Terry invited me to go on a helo ride out to collect some sediment and maybe take a core. The three people going would be Terry, Pete, and I. Helicopter rides are always really fun, so I jumped at the chance. It wasn't going to leave until around five o'clock, so I arranged all of the new samples so they could melt, and did various other things.
Five soon rolled around, and the three of us loaded onto the helicopter.
I
wasn't plugged into the headset, so I had to watch body-language to figure
out what was happening, and it turned out that we had a delay. One of
the instruments was bad, and they had to fix it. There was a lot of idle
time on the ground in the helo, with the rotors whipping around, but we
finally got off the ground. Terry had shown particular interest in an
area with a completely different shade of brown to it. It was much lighter
brown than normal sediment, and he wanted to go take samples.
We landed at our first site, took a quick core, and looked around for sediment. We found normal sediment, but then huge deposits of a lighter-colored "sediment." It turned out to be rotten algae, turned up through the melt-ponds and ridges. We had hypothesized this back while on station, but the odor of the decaying algae gave it away. We loaded back onto the helicopter, and headed to another site to take more sediment -- which went very quickly. We found a good deal of sediment, while the pilots kept the rotors spinning. We headed back on once we got a good sample, and headed back to the ship.
The helicopter circled around the ship for some time, waiting for an opportunity to land (the ship had to prepare for the helo), meanwhile I took some great pictures of the boat through the window which Terry had so generously let me sit by on the way back.
We landed, and scurried off for pizza night. Ice-liberty was called.
Well, that is very nice for the crew. I wasn't very excited, since I had
been on the ice pretty much all day, but it was fun to watch the crew
play rowdy football. They splashed through the melt-ponds (they were falling
a lot in them -- it seemed to me to be more purposeful than accidental
though...), and were having a good time. But the gang-plank was lowered
quickly, and the fog-horn was blown. I
thought that meant that we could get off, but I hesitated when people
started getting on. I heard a murmur about a polar bear, and then sure
enough, the bear-watch whistle blew twice, and everyone scuttled up the
stairs and onto the boat. The polar bear was never in sight -- you could
only see it with binoculars, but it was a polar bear nonetheless. From
what I saw, it seemed more interested in the seals that were lounging
around everywhere than the big red boat in the distance. As I watched
through the binoculars, a seal flopped around in the foreground, while
far in the background a polar bear was on the prowl. A classic scene --
but the seal knew the bear was there. It looked up, made sure the bear
was headed elsewhere, and then laid back down. It did this often enough
to exhibit its nervousness, but it never got so scared that it jumped
into its hole.
The polar bear had disappeared from the lenses of even the strongest binoculars, and the boat started up the engines. I hung around on the bow for a while, and then the Ex-O came up, and we talked for a while. We talked about various things, until all of the sudden he turned around, looking surprised, and backed up. He saluted the captain, who came and stood next to me, and we started chatting. The captain and I talked for a long time -- starting off first with the polar bears. While we were talking about that, Tara, who was talking with Tish, gave me the binoculars, and showed me the cliffs of ice-mirages that towered in the distance. At first she thought they were real cliffs on a coastline, but the captain explained the arctic mirages that appear. They are usually reversed images of whatever's on the water in the distance. He went into a story about how they had been on the ice with another ship once, and tried to contact it. They couldn't, it turned out, even locate it on the radar it was so far away. The atmosphere had magnified it, so that it looked only miles away.
We continued to talk, and got into marathon running. He is a runner -- I have seen him running the decks, and apparently he is into distance. He ran a military marathon in Washington D.C. one year, and recalled the grueling training in the summer heat (the race was in November). We talked about that for a while, and then a coastie came up and politely asked for the Captain's attention. The captain talked with him for minute or two, while I admired the beauty of a late arctic night. He came back and said that he was impressed with my presentation, which is one of the largest honors I've had on this trip. The fact that the Captain, with so much responsibility on his hands, came out of his way to compliment me on the talk that I did. It was the ultimate compliment for me, even if he was just being nice, to have the honor of speaking one-on-one with the Captain was good enough.
It was truly a great end to a long, good, day. I went to the weight room, and worked out for a while, and then resorted to the dry-lab to start this journal. I saw my polar bear, and got some ice-action on this beautiful summer day.