ARK-XXII/2, 1st Weekly Report
Ice station
28 July - 5 August 2007
Between crates and containers
On Saturday, the 28th of July, we departed from sunny Tromsoe in Northern Norway. The ultra clean system of our Dutch chemistry group was readily installed on deck, last shopping, necessary due to lost luggage, was finished. There was a worry whether or not all expedition equipment was delivered on time, but finally all was accounted for and everything was already stored on bord.
The summer accompanied us with blue skies and warm weather for a little while on our way into the Barents Sea. However we did not get much of it because unpacking had started with full power. The beginning of every cruise is typically governed by mild chaos: labs are distributed and then changed again, as there is never enough space for every ones needs. The containers are unloaded and boxes are missed just to be finally found where they were supposed to be. Instruments are set up and usually do not function on first demand until after some minutes of calming down. One day later, the chaos around the ship seized considerably accompanied by a small low pressure system that turned the sea surface from being a mirror towards smooth waves. The first afternoon we had a test station for both our CTD systems and everything went well and in the meantime everybody found his/her place to work.
Tuesday morning we started our expedition programme with a first section running from the shallow shelf of the Barents Sea across the Nansen Basin up to the Nansen Gakkel Ridge. Along this and the following sections we will carry out a wide spectrum of research. We will take hydrographical, biogeochemical, biological and geological samples and investigate the physical properties and the organisms of sea ice. We will come back to the individual projects in more detail in the coming reports.
Altogether our cruise will be a dedicated contribution to the International Polar Year 2007/08 that started on March 1 2007. IPY with its coordinated activities provides a unique chance to distinguish between spatial and temporal changes - a possibility that is not given with individual expeditions. In close cooperation with other cruises taking place during this summer and the next we aim at obtaining a Synoptic PAnarctic survey of the Climate and Environmental state (SPACE) of the Arctic Ocean in a period of drastic change. The decrease of the sea ice extent, warming of the atmosphere and ocean, changes in circulation patterns and the distribution of riverine input, how organisms are responding to these changes, all make a comprehensive survey necessary as a bench mark for long term observations.
On Wednesday afternoon we reached the ice edge at 81 30N. Within a couple of hours we sighted 4 Polar Bears which acted as a decent warning for the first ice station taking place on Thursday. Ice biologists and physicists spent an entire day on an ice flow measuring its thickness distribution and drilling ice cores for lab investigations. On the way to the north the ice cover got denser and denser and last night an increasing number of ice ridges forced our speed down to less than 2 knots.
We have an urgent request to those of you who want to send us official or private emails: being outside of the range of normal telecommunication satellites our email traffic is very much restricted. In order to avoid complete suffocation we reduced the size of emails that we let pass to less than 10 Kb. Maybe we consider this a chance to focus on the most important? So I will do that and send warm regards from the whole group - everybody is fine!
Ursula Schauer