ARK-XXIII/3, 1st weekly report

12 August to 17 August 2008

The first week of our expedition is over! Everybody arrived in good shape in Reykjavik. Some problems occurred with missing luggage. Some suit cases remained at Copenhagen Airport.

RV Polarstern left Iceland on August 12th, 20:00 and headed south towards the southern tip of Greenland. We will need more than 14 days to reach our research area in the East Siberian Sea. Immediately after the departure all groups started to unpack the scientific cargo to check for missing items.

On August 15th, we sailed around the southern tip of Greenland and are now heading north towards the Northwest Passage. This passage became famous through the tragic Franklin expedition from 1845-1848. In the course of this expedition 134 persons died partly because of a food poisoning, when searching for a shorter sea-way between Europe and Asia. The Northwest Passage was first sailed by Roald Amundsen in 1903-1906. Because of the constantly bad ice conditions no conventional ships were able to regularly sail this route, and thus the interest for this passage disappeared from the public’s sight.

This has significantly changed during the last decades. The sea ice in the Canadian fjords increasingly disappeared allowing ice breaking vessels to sail the passage during the summer in a few days. In the last three years the passage was almost completely ice free in August. This trend in sea ice distribution is also favourable for our expedition to reach the research area around the international date line. Currently the ice conditions are excellent, and will allow us to start with seismic profiling in the Canada Basin earlier than expected.

Today we are performing first tests to prepare the geophysical instruments for the future operations. For this a 3000 m long sensor cable (Streamer) is deployed behind the ship and configured. Shortly afterwards we passed the polar circle. Certainly, this has been accepted by Neptune only under protest. We forgot to apply for a permit. Most likely this will have some consequences. A first iceberg already appeared shortly afterwards.

Best wishes to the readers at home

Wilfried Jokat

August, 17th, 2008 Polar Circle 5°C