Ship lag

Idea from February 9, finally written and sent out on February 11

We have been traveling in high latitudes for several days now. I have to say the nature of ACE cruise is different to other science cruises I have been to before – we are stopping at many ports and islands on the way. This effectively means we need to keep up with the local time zone to arrive in port/island on local time. And as I said we have been traveling at high latitudes lately, covering many degrees of longitude in one day. So, we are advancing our ship clocks by one hour every other day. And sometimes every day, cause every two days is not enough. All these changes result in a very weird “ship lag” – a kind of jet lag that creeps up on you gradually. Adjusting by one hour seems trivial, but we have adjusted for three hours in four days and combined with a lot of work these adjustments eat up all our sleep time…
I have measurements I take every three hours on ship time, 3am and 6am ones being the most painful ones. I delegated most of the 6 am ones, but even staying up for 3am and having another hour eaten by the “clock change” made me into a sleeping zombie.
Luckily I have amazing people around me, who are willing to help! My roommate took my 3am shift the other day so I can sleep one night. How awesome is that?

And please don’t think that this is a whiny post, here’s an illustration for you. Yesterday I was launching an XBT in the morning thinking that I would rather still be sleeping, but then I finally opened my eyes, saw all these amazing icebergs we were passing by and realized that of all places on Earth, I would rather be here – admiring all this amazing scenery despite the lack of sleep. I wish someone else was awake at that ungodly hour to take a picture of me launching an XBT with an iceberg background ;). Oh well. You just have to imagine how awesome it looked.

Another perk of traveling at high latitudes in this time of year – we almost have a polar day. Yesterday the sun set and basically rose back up again. So here’s a picture I took at sunset:

There’s an iceberg and a “virga” cloud – a special kind of precipitation usually in the form of ice that never reaches the surface.

I also have rather sporadic internet coverage now, so pardon me for not updating my blog that much. I’m doing well and you can always email me at the ACE expedition email.

Thanks for reading,
Masha

Antarctic sea ice!

What meant to be January 30, but I am actually sending it on February 2

I had a few days with too much work and not enough time to send pictures through, but here’s a picture of Antarctic sea ice and me from a few days ago. We have been in sea ice for a few day now, it has been amazing. I even recorded some sounds for Fedtsov, I hope it worked. I had no time to check yet.
Going through the Antarctic sea ice is somewhat different than the Arctic. First, especially when we were closer to the coast we had a lot of beautiful icebergs around – a very pretty scene. Second, the sea ice on average has more snow on top. Third, this is what happened today – we were going through broken 100% sea ice covered sea with quite a big wave propagating through the ice. 

I never saw such big waves in sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, maybe I just did not see them, but maybe they don’t get as big….

I’m planning to write a long post describing all the different things we do – sampling for sea water from the CTDs, sampling for precipitation, launching radiosondes and catching snowflakes. I even started writing it a few days ago. However, it is taking a lot of time – primarily cause most of the time I’m busy doing these tasks. So I thought I’d post a little note with a picture now and have all my readers hold their breath for more.

It has been great fun to work with my friend Irina, we laugh a lot, especially when she consistently manages to catch more snowflakes than I do. Maybe she whispers something to them, I will need to find out ;)

Ok, it’s time for me to go to bed as another busy day is planned tomorrow.
Thanks for reading,

Mertz glacier, East Antarctica

January 29

Hello from Mertz glacier. The weather on January 28, 2017 turned from bad to worse, so we did not expect much from the next day. You can imagine my surprise waking up in the morning realizing that we stopped for a CTD station and that it will only get better. After I was done sampling (closer to the afternoon) I finally went outside and I saw the sun! and the walls of Mertz glacier! It was such a picture perfect moment, that I couldn’t resist and did my “traditional Antarctic jump” on a heli deck

Helicopter pilots went on an exploration flight around the glacier and soon took the ice core drilling party out to the ice. They returned about 9 PM at night having completed more coring than they expected – what a day they had.
While helicopters were gone, the ship started to deploy our hi-tech submersibles – ROPOS systems. There’s a website written on them ropos.com, I don’t have internet access here, but maybe you can read more from land. The machines are about the size of a small car, they have hydraulic pumps to help them navigate in the water and many-many instruments all over. As they have cameras all over, we were enjoying the streaming video last night during dinner.

A little bit of scientific history. Mertz glacier used to have an extensive tongue grounded several km out into the bay. In 2010 a huge chuck of ice tore off the tongue and a massive iceberg was formed. This changed the geography of the area quite dramatically. Grounded glacier tongue was acting as a barrier for sea ice, leading to extremely old sea ice chunking to the west of it and keeping the polynya further off shore (see map).
Since the collapse of the glacier tongue is so recent, the old map on the screen of our lab computer shows that we have been on top of the glacier for quite a few days now!
What we are interested in studying are the physical, chemical and biological changes in the area that occurred after the collapse of the glacier. We are collecting samples from the ship and with the help of our submarine robots to understand how things have changed since a big chunk of glacier melted.
To get better data right off the edge of the ice, our captain “parked” the icebreaker into the glacier last night. It was really exciting to watch and again the weather was just perfect. All in all we had quite an adventurous day!