Scientists on Ice

I don't want to give you the idea that science is all fun and games. We work hard! But I have to admit that today has been pretty spectacular. The morning was spent watching the helicopters take off and land for an ice reconnaissance mission. Since the ship is fully iced in, we got to go off ship and play in the snow!

When I took that photo, I was standing on 3 inches of snow over about 3 feet of ice over some 2000 feet of water. You can see the ship and the returning helicopter!

In the Q & A post, I showed a photo of an iceberg. That ice came from water vapor in the atmosphere which formed snow or rain and landed on an ice shelf or glacier. The ice then broke off into the ocean.

The ice under the snow in this picture is completely different. It came from the ocean! When seawater freezes, it forms sea ice that floats on the surface of the water. The ice crystals push the salt out in to little pockets between the crystals. Over time, the salt drains out leaving fresh ice behind. The ice we were on is called fast ice, because it is attached ("made fast" in sailing terms) to the ice shelf.

Hola, Amigos!

People are very friendly at sea. Still, Ted Scambos spends an awful lot of time talking about his amigos. But it turns out that these are no ordinary friends - they're Automated Meteorology-Ice-Geophysics Observing Stations.

The area that we'll be visiting used to be a huge ice shelf, called Larsen B. It collapsed 2002, losing 3320 square kilometers (1,282 square miles) of ice. One of the goals of this research cruise is to figure out how that happened and what it means for the rest of the area. Only a small piece of Larsen B, the Scar Inlet Shelf, remains.

Before this cruise, Ted and his team tested the hypothesis that when there is a lot of water sitting on an ice shelf, it works its way down into cracks in the ice and causes the ice shelf to break apart. Normally, the pressure of the ice is enough to keep small cracks from growing. But this time, there was so much water that the cracks were pushed all the way open and the ice sheet broke apart.

How did he test this hypothesis? With AMIGOS! AMIGOS are machines that keep track of their location, the temperature of the air around them, and the thickness of the ice underneath them. They even take photos and send all of this information back to Ted. Ted put AMIGOS out on icebergs and saw that there was a lot of melted water on the icebergs right before they came apart. Their temperature was near the freezing point of water, which is very warm for an iceberg. These results were consistent with the hypothesis that water on the ice causes them to break apart.

But to get stronger proof, Ted is putting newer, better AMIGOS on the Scar Inlet shelf to see exactly what happens. If the hypothesis is correct, they should see more and more melted water on the surface of the ice before it breaks apart. Here is a picture of an AMIGOS on an iceberg, and one of Ted working on a thermometer for one of the new AMIGOS. Just so you know, he isn't only interested in how icebergs and ice shelves break apart. He's also monitoring what happens to glaciers after the ice shelves around them are gone, but we'll cover that in another post.





(Photo originally published in Journal of Glaciology, reproduced with
permission of the author)

Commenter Q & A

Science is just starting to get underway, so I thought this would be a good time to respond to some commenter questions. Just so you know, I'm doing this all by email, not internet, so I can't reply in-line to your comments.

Richard: What is the break down on crew versus scientists on board?

The breakdown is actually between science, Raytheon, and Edison Chouest Offshore (ECO). ECO is responsible for running the ship and Raytheon is responsible for assisting science in labs and on the deck. We have 29 science, 14 Raytheon, and 23 ECO.

Nancy: What a wonderful, interesting set of pictures. They make me feel as if I am there with you on your ship. Did you have to do anything special to clean off the PVC pieces? Was it the first time you took samples of mud from the seafloor?

Thanks. We actually tried vacuuming each other to get the PVC off, but it didn't work. The stuff finally came off when we walked down the very windy dock to the ship. And yes, this will be the first time that I help sample mud from the seafloor.

Erik: Good Day Mrs. T, I envy you, your cruise to Antarctica. I am a semi-retired yacht captain working ashore, so would love to follow your research. You said you are studying ocean currents. What is your background?

Your job sounds pretty cool too! I'm a doctoral candidate in ocean and climate physics. Most of my background is in the tropics, so this cold weather stuff is all new to me. I use equipment called Lowered Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (LADCPs) to measure ocean velocity using sound. I'll post more about the mechanics of that later on. Where did you sail as a yacht captain?

RW: Found you through the Happiness Project. I cannot believe you are going to Antarctica. When my children were just little we watched a documentary about such a vessel. And we have read a Madeleine L'Engle book about such a trip. I am super excited to have discovered your blog.

First, major thanks to the happiness project and Gretchen Rubin for promoting my blog. And thank you for reminding me about the Madeleine L'Engle book! I have a signed, hard cover copy of that book somewhere in my mother's house and I highly recommend it.

RW: Hope the waters have settled for you. How long before you reach your destination?

Funny you should mention it. The waters have settled, but the pack ice is too thick to move through. We're turning around and trying a different route to the Larsen B ice shelf. Our best guess is a few days, but we just don't know.

In case you're wondering, I took that photo yesterday from the bridge. A post all about icebergs will be coming soon!

I love rock and roll

Which is good, because we've been doing plenty of rocking and rolling! Things have calmed down a bit, but we were getting 40-foot waves. I wasn't actually seasick, but I couldn't do much besides lay down in my bunk and wait for calmer waters. I kept waking up because I was sliding around in my bunk!

Boats, like airplanes, can move in three ways: roll, pitch, and yaw. Roll is when the while ship moves port and starboard (left
and right). Pitch is when the ship moves forward and aft (front and back), which I think feels much worse. Yaw is when the boat points in different directions. That one isn't usually a big deal, because the captain keeps the boat going straight. But if the boat were spinning in circles, that would probably be enough to make everyone dizzy.

This is what it looked like when we left port:


I'm sorry I couldn't get any pictures of the rough seas for you - it looked awesome from the windows - but I wasn't feeling well enough to go outside with my camera. Here is a map of our current position:

Once we passed the tip of South America, we were no longer sheltered by land. That meant we got the full force of the Drake Passage, which is the roughest water in the world!

I have the best job ever

(Photo copyright Kathleen Gavahan)

Yes, those are helicopters. We'll be doing helicopter operations over the ice and over the water once we're further south. You can see how well they're secured to the hangar! There are only a few inches between the blades and the walls.


The helicopter pilots let me wear a flight helmet and sit inside! I loved it, and I can't wait to fly in one. The flight helmet that I'm wearing will let me communicate with the pilot and other passengers by radio, since it will be too loud for conversation. And just so you know, those highly fashionable overalls I'm wearing are part of my clothing issue while I'm in Antarctica.

Complicated Science, Simple Machines

Okay, we're still stuck in port. But a ship is a pretty interesting place even when it isn't going anywhere. This is where we will be going:

That's the Antarctic peninsula, just south of the tip of South America. The rainbow colors indicate the depth of the water in places that the ship has been. The pictures taped to the big map are recent images of the ice in that area. I don't know very much about ice (yet!), but I can tell you that it's very icy out there.

Once we leave port, we'll be doing a lot of complicated science. But we have to think about safety on the ship, and we'll be crossing some rough water. Here is a piece of equipment that I will need once we're working:

It's a battery charger and it's very heavy. When the ship moves, it could fall off the table and break or hit something. So before we leave port, everything gets tied down. That's where the simple machines come in! See the metal circle to the right of the charger? That's an eye hook. To get it into the table, I drilled a hole and screwed it in. But it was too hard to tighten with just my hands, so I used a lever.

I know that it's just a screwdriver, and I'm not even using it right! I apply effort to the handle, the part of the eye hook closest to the effort acts as the fulcrum, and the other side of the eye hook is the load.

Once I have an eye hook on either side of charger, I still need to use rope to tie it down. But I can't get the rope tight enough! Luckily, I can use a pulley to gain a mechanical advantage:

How is this a pulley system? I'm going to use the eye hook as my fixed pulley and that loop in the rope as my moveable pulley. And there is is, all tied down and safe:

And here you can see the pulley loop (formed by a knot called a trucker's hitch) and how the remaining rope is attached to the eye hook (using two half-hitches).

We sail at 1500 today! That's 3pm for you land-based types.

Cargo in the Hold

This will be my last post from land. We're still setting up to do science, but this is so cool I just had to show it to you. We store entire containers on ships. Containers (like the one you saw in the last post) are the big metal things on the back of trucks, and they are heavy! But how do you get an entire container inside a ship?

See the floor where people are standing?


They attach the crane to floor...


And lift it right up! The space you see underneath is called the hold:




Then the container is attached the crane and guided in:


Here it is sitting in the hold:


And here it is in place so that there's room for another container next to it!



That's all for now. We plan to set sail tomorrow, January 2nd, at 1pm. FYI, I won't be able to post as many pictures once we're at sea, which I think is why I posted so many this time.