Laila's Arctic Cruise Blog

I am a science writer and couldn't believe my luck: I was sitting in an interview at the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban, listening to Dr Ray Leakey explaining the remit of their expedition to the Arctic. Suddenly he asked me to try on a sailing coat. "I think this is your size. Oh, assuming you want the job." I was off to the Arctic! As part of a huge science programme called Oceans 2025, SAMS has teamed up with other marine institutes to explore what is happening to life in the changing Arctic. A biologist by background, I have joined the team to report back on their findings. Join me as, each day, I learn more about the science and get to know the people on this once-in-a-lifetime journey. As a friend said "I'll never get to the Arctic – make sure you tell me all about it."

Wednesday, 27 August: Back at SAMS

I went in to work for the first time this afternoon, having made peace with small child.

It was great to see the faces I’d come to know so well over the last month. Pauline and Susan were hard at work in the lab analysing samples, whilst others like Arlene, Henrik and Ray were wedged behind computers preparing scientific conference papers and reports of the cruise. I had this intense desire to get together with them all and talk about our time in the Arctic.

 

 

Arlene has been in since the start of the week and I think summed things up perfectly: "For the past few days Arctic people have been sitting together at coffee as we can't manage to mix properly. Or I've seen them wandering aimlessly about the corridors. Everyone still seems really tired and zoned out. It’s good to be back but I’m missing the ship - no more breakfast looking out over sea ice."

There are analyses going on in the labs that will reveal how rapidly carbon settles to the sea floor in the Arctic, and many samples still waiting in freezers and cool rooms on the ship. These will be collected when the James Clark Ross docks in Immingham in a month, and transported carefully back up to SAMS. Then another round of analyses will begin.

Meantime we can say for sure that the Arctic still has some sea ice, though it was not where we expected to find it. The microscopic plant life appears to have had its "spring bloom" long before the ice melted from the water above it (which is why by the time we arrived, the tiny animals in the water column had done their feeding and breeding for the year and already headed down to deep water to see out the coming winter). Interestingly, it appears that the closely coupled relationship between microscopic plants and bacteria in the water column isn’t as closely coupled as scientists had expected – far more nutritious carbon compounds were being produced by the plants than were being mopped up by other organisms. Which is good news if those compounds settle to the seafloor and are buried for millennia (removing carbon from circulation).

Though my adventure and this blog are now over, there are two things still to watch out for on the website:

The science summary of findings which is just being written by Ray the expedition leader; and

The photos I took during this amazing journey. Some have gone into the blog but there are many more and I shall try to put them up into the Gallery in the coming week.

(And thirdly, look out for the next instalment, ICECHASER II, planned for summer 2010!)

Till then, thanks for coming along with us all on this amazing journey.

 

 

 

Monday, 25 August: Scotland once more

SCOTLAND ONCE MORE

Three things hit me, with a "you’re in a different world now" sort of slap in the face on my return. First was the smell as I left Glasgow airport on Saturday – the smell of plant life in the air. Subtle (lurking behind the aroma of av-fuel) but organic, sweet, and damp: essence of distant compost heap. Second shock arrived later that night in the form of – darkness! I slept so well!

And third was the tap. I was standing in the bathroom cleaning my teeth, and suddenly realised I didn’t need to urgently turn the tap off – we weren’t evaporating then recondensing the ocean to put water into the tank here (though you could argue that’s exactly what nature was doing for us).

 

 

 

Thursday, 21 August: LONGYEARBYEN, SVALBARD 78 degrees North

We left the ship at midday in Longyearbyen. Cranes swinging gracefully, crew in orange boiler suits and hard hats getting the next load of scientific equipment out of the holds, the new scientists coming aboard - onto our ship! Except it wasn’t our ship any more.

I walked down the gangway and onto the dock. The Captain came to say farewell to us all. Simon the 3rd Mate and Robert the Mate were there too, taking time from their busy load-shuffling exercise. Goodbye JCR. I’m not sure if I’ll ever sail with you again, and bizarrely the thought brings me close to tears. I wasn’t the only one to feel sad as we loaded up onto the bus. On the other hand, some of our group were delighted to be getting off at last. Time to get back to comfortable labs and equipment that doesn’t need to be tied down!

We set off to find our accommodation in Longyearbyen - a barren, functional little place cupped in the folds of a brown glacial valley. I just wanted to go home, but we had to keep two “contingency” days incase the ship was delayed in ice. So we’re here till early on the 23rd. The bus dropped us and disappeared. Everyone dispersed to hostels, leaving me standing alone with a few bags in the cold Arctic sunshine, gazing around feeling a little shell-shocked. I suddenly realized I felt quite peaceful. Enveloped by stillness – no clanking, no banging, no background hum that we’d learned to live with day and night on the ship. Alone with the sun, the sky and the hills. I took a deep breath and relaxed.

 

Stig and Annette fly back to Tromso tomorrow so at 2p.m. they met us all to take us for a walk. We had to go with them, because they had firearms – to protect us from polar bears. Noone leaves town without a firearm, the danger of attack is real.

Our large group of microbiologists, physical scientists and technicians set off up the slopes of “Sarcophagus” mountain and even after five weeks on a ship managed a decent old pace. A glacier slipped imperceptibly down the valley to our left as we ascended the rubbly slope. Finally we reached the ridge and looked down over the little town below. Why was I so cold? I realized this is the first time I have been outside for a day since… since leaving Scotland.

The computer is running low and I don’t have a Norwegian power converter so there’ll be no further blog before we get home. I’ve looked out my air ticket and grinned as I realise once more how unique this trip has been – I stepped onto a ship in England but step onto a plane in Svalbard for the return journey (just 12 hours of it, via Norway and Denmark) to return to Scotland.

My journey of understanding has been immense too, thanks in great part to our leader Ray’s patience and enthusiasm over microbes. I’ll cover more on the actual scientific findings of the expedition later. For now:
 
Lessons learned on this expedition

1. You don’t need to take a torch on a trip to the Arctic in summertime
2. Microbes are everywhere – in the sea, in the seafloor, in the ice that floats above both
3. Microbe biologists are determined and ingenious in their attempts to study what is happening in the Arctic environment
4. For the tiny organisms in the Arctic Ocean, summer is over long before August
5. Sea ice is highly unpredictable and – even when it extends in one sheet to every horizon – very mobile
6. Ice breaking is very noisy and extremely hard work, even for a ship of 6000 tonnes
7. I want to come back!

 

When we get back to SAMS at Dunstaffnage I shall post up some of the best photos from the trip and some of the most interesting scientific findings. Till then...

Later 20 August: SAILING BACK

Guess what I did this afternoon. I went for a swim! I was standing on deck yesterday helping with Mags’ calibration – reeling a line in and out so the metal ball passed beneath the ship. Below in the water were jellyfish and comb jellies blobbing around and as I gazed down I had the almost irresistible urge to jump in. So today, I did - at the little beach by the jetty where we moored. I wrapped up, ran about, got hot, then had Henrik (Swedish – used to doing ridiculous things like jumping into very cold water) coach me in how best to enter the sea.

In the distance a glacier creaked and calved off icebergs. The water was about 3^oC. I ran in, ducked under, gasped, then swam around as my skin slowly went numb and my muscles seized up. Quite an incredible experience. I’d hoped the bearded seal we’d seen from the jetty might come back but he was elsewhere. By the time I came out five minutes later my skin was so numb I couldn’t tell I was toweling myself (well apart from the obvious fact that I could see I was). It was ten minutes later, back on the ship, as the cold blood from my skin started to flow back to my core that I felt cold. But what an experience!

11:45pm
Position  78^o 22.1’ N  10^o 37.8’ E

Now we’re cruising sedately on a calm sea, past jagged snow-covered peaks, the sky glowing orange where the sun sits just below the horizon. Fulmars are riding the wind ahead of the ship and the day is beginning once more. In just a few hours we’ll be getting off the ship, leaving the gear onboard stowed in the hold, taking just a bag each for the flight back to the UK. That’s not till Saturday so who knows what a group of SAMS scientists will find to do for two days in Longyearbyen. I’ll let you know.

The lines will be thrown ashore at 7.45am and we’ll be off a few hours later. It will be strange. This ship has become – not home – that’s corny. It’s become like a place you go for the best holiday of your life – except it’s been really hard work!

I’m fascinated by how familiar the people onboard have become. Sure I’ve been living on a ship with them for five weeks, but faces that were aloof and unknown have become as homely as my favourite armchair. The scientists are amazingly warm and friendly – a complete absence of arrogance or intolerance. Even under the utmost stress – as many of them have been, pushed day and night to get results from their experiments – they can manage a smile.

The ship’s crew have been amazing. They are paid to do a job, to keep the ship running efficiently, to get it from A to B, to lower and raise equipment in and out of the water. Nobody pays them extra to be nice, to laugh and smile even when it’s snowing and they’ve been out on deck for hours already. But they do. Some are quiet and keep to themselves. Others are quite lively. And all of them get the job done - with great professionalism.

The smiles I’ll remember are those of George the Bosun (a big, rough grin), Derek the Steward, John the Deck Officer (magical when you saw it), and Douglas (yes Dougie, famous for his winning smile) the 2nd Mate.

The Captain’s, when it did appear, was accompanied by a certain look, a raising of the eyebrow, that said “I know something that you don’t”. Which was invariably true. The Captain does an amazing job. It’s not just about steering the ship and balancing budgets, organizing the logistics of moving a ship full of gear from Britain to the Antarctic or the Arctic Oceans (often through poorly charted waters).

It’s also about managing a company – a large team of men who have to work and live together for months on end often without even leaving the ship. His responsibility is to keep their environment comfortable and their work manageable and to ensure they are as sane when they get off the ship as they were when they got on.

Congratulations and thanks to you all.

 

Wednesday, 20 August: DRY LAND

Docked at Ny Alesund

Position:  78^o55.7'N  11^o56.3'E

 

Dry land!

It's calling to me!

We've docked at Ny Alesund for the ship to offload supplies to the UK scientists working here at the National Environment Research Council base (which is run by the British Antarctic Survey – a safe pair of hands in this environment). It may look bleak – grey-brown gravel serves as road and path alike – and there's just brown tundra beyond, but it's calling to me. The moment the gangway was down and the safety briefing over (don't leave the paths, there's polar bears (yes, we know)) the exodus began. The ship is not sinking, and I am in no way referring to my companions as rats, but the old phrase sprung to mind immediately. A scatter of red, orange and yellow coats now litters the little track leading up to the research huts.

I shall follow.

Oh, science-wise: Well, the show really is nearly over. Last night was a long one for Mags as we did a survey up the fjord, all the while recording echosounder data on plankton distribution in the water column. The 90^o turns at the corner of each survey line were fun. There were plankton samplings done also – at half midnight and each two hours thereafter – to correlate echosounder data with the real life below.

Everyone is now packed. Tonight we start the cruise round to Longyearbyen and our departure. I'll write more later.

 

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