Elin Darelius & Team

Vår reports from Antarctica:

Cruise work is hard work! A week ago the actual scientific part of our cruise started, and we’ve been on our feet since. We deployed the Sail buoy and Sea glider just north of the sea ice edge and then headed into the ice. The “ice edge” is really a fitting term: you’re in open water, and suddenly, there’s ice all around. This depends on the wind and tides, but when we passed south it was a perfectly clear boundary, and very nicely marked the arrival of our science week. As soon as we passed into the ice penguins started to pop up, and we were all running back and forth on the bridge trying to spot them all. There are mostly Adelie penguins here, but we’ve spotted a few emperors as well, a few seals, one group of orcas, and another group of whales that we think might have been Minke whales.

The sea ice conditions were a bit harsher than we’d hoped for and we had to change our route a bit, but it looks like we will cover most of the planned CTD stations and our mooring locations by the end. In addition, we got some measurements from a polynya just east of our ice shelf destination due to the detour we had to take.

On New Year’s Eve, we reached the ice shelf, and the crew anchored the ship to the ice front. To put it in perspective, we had to walk to the 9^th floor to be on the level with the ice shelf. The crew from the Troll station arrived just before us and had already set up camp – it was a surrealistic sight to suddenly see people and “civilization” so far from anywhere, and after so many weeks without meeting any new people! As soon as the anchors were in place the unloading began, and we started an intense MSS profile protocol on the other side of the ship. As I’m most used to working with profiles from the other side of Antarctica and by far this close to an ice shelf, these profiles looked like nothing I’ve seen before. The software lets us look at the profiles real-time, and as we always do this profiling in pairs it’s been really interesting to discuss what might be happening in the ocean below us while taking the measurements. I’m growing very fond of this MSS instrument!

We our first day in 2021 on the sea ice itself. In Rektangelbukta, there is fast ice – sea ice that is attached to the coast – which makes it relatively stable and safe, and perfect for sea ice measurements. We packed our instruments and our lunch and set off on snow scooters with one of the guys from Troll who had assessed the safety some days before. As we arrived at our spot, we were welcomed by a team of very curious Adelie penguins and a serious-looking emperor penguin.

They lost interest in us when we were done with our lunch and started the process of digging a perfectly square pit in the snow to reach down to the ice. Our main task on the ice was to take ice cores to study temperature, salinity, biology, microplastics, and more, and to get these cores, the snow must be removed first.

When we pulled up our first core, the ocean flooded up through the hole, and suddenly our nice solid area was a shallow swimming pool. This happened because there is so much snow that it pushes the snow-ice interface below sea level. After pulling up all our ice cores we made a hole large enough to drop instruments through and got measurements of both temperature, salinity, some helium samples, turbulence, and also a special kind of ice called platelet ice, which forms in the ocean itself, not at the surface like normal sea ice. It was an extremely long day, and my face was burning and my eyes stinging when we got back to the ship from all the reflection in the snow, but also such a great day with lots of sampling methods I’ve never done before, the creativity of setup, and of course penguins and coffee breaks with the Antarctic sea ice and distant icebergs as the view. And I’ve done a cartwheel on Antarctica!

Now, we’re heading northward, and we’ve only got a few days left of scientific work. So far, the moorings have been deployed and recovered successfully, and hopefully, I’ll be able to say the same about the last mooring in just a few days. We continue with CTD stations and MSS profiles, water sampling, and mooring preparations. When all of this is done we’ll hopefully have time to do some bird and whale observations on our way back to Cape Town, besides packing up all our gear and tidying up the containers. On the way south we saw new species every day, and it would be interesting to see whether we see the same pattern on the way back. But for now, we focus on the work for the next few days and try to avoid any major problems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vår Dundas reports from Malik Arctica:

We’re in the southern hemisphere! The last, almost two, weeks have flown by, filled by a mix of deck work and what I guess you could call home-office. We survived the Bay of Biscay without too many scratches – mostly everything was well secured in our container. Not being used to life at sea and the importance of securing every tiniest thing, I had a very annoying bottle of detergent rolling around on my bathroom floor throughout the night, and a small glass bottle decided to jump out of the cabinet, making a total mess that I had the pleasure to clean up. Otherwise, we were mostly unharmed.

Last Monday, summer began for us, and we’ve been working on deck in shorts and t-shirts until today. Thirty degrees in both air and water is something you get used to quickly, especially in December. What a luxury! Our main task has been to continue testing our equipment. Every instrument must be set up to talk with their respective computers and software, which is often more complicated than it sounds. Through long processes of try and error, we have installed drivers, detected COM-ports, and switched cables and batteries. Now we finally think we have all programs in order, and we’re able to communicate smoothly with all our instruments.

Since we don’t know how conditions will be at the ice shelf front, we’re bringing several setups for measuring conductivity (which we translate into salinity) and temperature (our CTDs). If everything is smooth and calm, we have a large one to use, which we prefer. It is can take water samples at several depths, and measure both temperature, conductivity, fluorescence, oxygen, and incident light. However, this CTD is dependent on the cranes on the ship, and in bad weather, these will be difficult to maneuver safely. So we are bringing a small one as well, which we can operate with a much smaller portable winch. In addition, we have an even smaller one, which we can also bring out on the sea ice itself to drop down below the ice through a borehole. Many options mean many things to test, but after today’s final tests, I think we might be good to go regarding winch systems and CTD-setup. It’s good to be getting things in order!

 

 

We have also managed to wake up the autonomous Seaglider from Norgliders and the Sailbuoy from Akvaplan-Niva which we have onboard, and made them talk with their respective owners at GFI in Bergen and at Akvaplan-Niva. We have labeled countless sampling bottles and practiced water sampling routines for nutrients, helium, CO2, oxygen, and a few more. The captain was met with great excitement when he spontaneously decided to take a short stop in the middle of the ocean so that we could do a proper profile with the MSS to finally check that we had everything in order and to practice the profiling procedure.

Life onboard is, however, not all about testing equipment. We saw a blue whale just north of Madeira (we think), which I’m still very excited about, a few dolphins, and a whole bunch of flying fish (they get so far!). And there are more creatures in the ocean – if you try to cross the equator without being baptized, King Neptune knows, and he comes on board. No one may cross the equator without being baptized. So we were baptized, and are now part of the Trusty Shellbacks and initiated into the Solemn mysteries of the ancient order of the deep, after drinking a horribly tasting cleansing potion that I suspect is mostly based on fish oil, smeared in another sticky potion, and finally completely drenched in seawater. Besides this slightly traumatizing baptism, I’m delighted to have been renamed (you get a new name when entering King Neptune’s ranks) the Psychedelic frogfish, as they are amazingly cool (give them a search). To celebrate our new worthiness at sea, we had a soccer tournament in the cargo hulls. I wish I had a picture, but the match was too serious to have the time for photos.

 

As soon as we crossed the equator, the weather turned colder and cloudier, giving our sunburns some well deserved time to heal. Still, I hope we get a bit more summer-warmth before entering the cold and icy Southern Ocean. If things go according to plan, we will reach Cape Town around the 20th of December, where we’ll bunker up on fuel before starting our final transect towards the ice shelf.

 

… for news from Vår&co onboard Malik Arctica  you can check out their position here: https://www.royalarcticline.com/vessel-tracking/  (chose Malik Arctica below the map).

 

Vår, Malik Arctica, and the others from NPI are steadily heading south and have just passed Madeira.  Temperatures are rising  – and so is the interest in the Weddell Sea ice concentrations. Currently, there is way too much red (high concentrations) in the map (below), but a lot can happen in the three weeks that are left of their journey… fingers crossed for a big storm that clears the area where they are to work!

Vår & Sebastien enjoying the sun. (Photo: T. Hattermann)