Peter the 1st

February,17

On Wednesday February 15 we arrived at Peter the 1st island. It is located at roughly 90 degrees west - which marks about 70% of the longitudinal journey we have to complete during all three legs. Longitude-wise leg 2 is the most intense and it is also the longest. Ship lag is definitely upon us all...

When we first got the sea ice maps for Peter the 1st island it looked unapproachable. We almost ditched it completely from the program, but the sea ice seemed less intense later and we decided to try. We got into heavy sea ice late morning on the 15th and woke up many seals resting on ice floes:

I have never seen so many seals at the same time, I was taking pictures and videos and I couldn't get enough. I guess they did not expect us at all!

The views of the island were memorizing:

There were all forms of ice all around us - sea ice, iceberg, glaciers, etc. Even though we did not have much time to spare, we decided to use this opportunity to visit the island and collect some samples: drill an ice core, collect biological and geological samples from the beaches and collected some sea ice for the biological analyses. Helicopters and Zodiacs once again were busy for a quite a few hours delivering multiple parties to different locations, which provided good news from our upper deck "office balcony":

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,