Born to fly

March 13

Today I got to fly in one of our helicopters! It was amazing and I am really grateful to the whole team of our two pilots and two helicopter engineers for making it happen. They always wanted to take more people, but there was never enough time in the good weather window for the “fun” flights for the scientists. There are quite a lot of scientists on board; some need to use helicopters to get to their scientific destination (like ice coring people can only reach their coring sights via helicopters). There are also quite a few of VIPs – Frederik Paulsen and his guests always want to fly everywhere. And then there are scientists like me, whose work does not involve going to the top of a glacier or going to any island at all really. So I never got to fly…

There were always “attempts” – in case the weather is good and there is a lot of “extra time” we will be spending at an island, it was always rumored that we, the ship-locked people of Tryoshnikov will get to fly. But this never happened. I stopped being hopeful about it in the middle of leg one; I never even mentioned it on my blog (I think).

Today we were at the last island – last time our helicopters were flying during ACE. I was working upstairs in “my meteorological” office, when one of the pilots came in and said that he heard I would fly today. At first I thought it was a cruel joke on his part – I’ve heard this so many times already! But I decided to check with the hangar and to my surprise one of the helicopter engineers greeted me with a special orange helicopter suite.

I was scheduled to go for a test flight with the helicopter engineer – they had to do safety checks with the machine before putting it to rest till Cape Town. My flight almost did not happen as a snow shower started out of nowhere (ok, ok there were clouds all over, but not low clouds…).  I was thinking that fitting into one of the heli-suites would be as close as I would get to flying on ACE helicopter.

But the snow cleared up and off we went. There were two helicopters getting tested, so our wonderful heli-team took four passengers from the crowd of scientists who’s been on the ship the longest and never went anywhere.

What can I say? It was absolutely amazing!!!

My favorite part was flying over an iceberg really-really low and watching the waves wash off the base of the ice.

It was also really fun to play with another helicopter, go hi and low and left and right

We flew over the water, over icebergs and over glaciers on Bouvet island

One thing I did not realize before – helicopter’s nose is pointing down for the most part – so it’s amazingly nice views of everything happening below

What an amazing gift from our helicopter team! Thank you so much!
I actually meant to write a separate post about them a long time ago, since my grandfather has a rather lengthy journal entry about the «aviation team» from 1960. This post is getting too long, so I will introduce my heroes and pick it up in the next post.
Here they are:

Sam (helicopter engineer), Sergio (pilot), Bob (pilot), Ian (engineer)

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!