Seismic off East Greenland

FS „POLARSTERN“ ARK XXIV/3
Reykjavik – Bremerhaven
Weekly Report No. 2, 10.08. to 15.08.2009

The last week was quite busy. On Monday, we still deployed some seismic recording stations in the Kong Oscar Fjord. These stations will record the acoustic energy, which will be generated by the airguns on Polarstern. That we are operating in a remote but somehow populated area became clear when one of our helicopters was caught in fog during the installation of a seismic recording station. Onboard the ship we observed that it was obvious that the fog field was small and fast moving. Informing the pilot about this fact was difficult since the radio communication was very bad. To our surprise, an aircraft of the “Air Berlin” company assisted us. They were enroute their flight to North America when seeing our ship from some kilometres altitude. They listened to our radio communication and could hear the helicopter clearly. Without any problems they passed the weather information to the helicopter pilot.

After having deployed all the stations we started to acquire deep seismic data along an approx. 460 km long profile. While the ship steamed with a constant speed of 5 ktns, the towed airgun cluster fired exactly every 60 seconds, emitting acoustic energy into the water which will be recorded by the land stations up to distances of 200 km. After two days, the profile was finished and we started to retrieve the ocean bottom seismometers. By Saturday morning, all instruments including the land stations had been retrieved, and we immediately started to download the hard discs of the instrument to view the recorded data. On August 15th around noon, Polarstern was again off Mestersvig to pick up the geology camp, which we had installed last week. Mestersvig is an assembly of a few buildings and a landing strip. It is a Danish military outpost. While the station is only manned by two persons during winter time, it hosts a lot of tourists and scientists during the summer. A local police station consisting of three persons control all activities in the natural reserve. They control and document every activity, and check if the necessary permits have been issued in order to work in the world’s largest Natural reserve (NorthEast-Greenland-National park). This national park stretches along the entire East Greenland coast north of 72°N with a size of approx. 970.000 km2, almost three times the size of Germany. However, less than 100 people permanently live here in the different research stations along the coast (6). According to their own statements, they discovered the Polarstern only by accident while out on a fishing trip in one of the close-by fjords. They asked to visit the ship to check our permits. After an hour, the check had been completed. It was, by the way, a very pleasant control, and for us one of the rare opportunities to talk to people who are actually living and working on Greenland. In our case, these three Danes are currently employed by the Danish army and are stationed at Mestersvig for at least 12 months.

This time the weather was fine during all flight activities. Thus, all stations/camps deployed by us in the Kong Oscar Fjord were back on the vessel by Saturday noon. Within the next week, we will sail northwards along the East Greenland coast to start our scientific activities in the Fram Strait around 80°N. However, this evening we will meet the first expanse ice fields of this voyage.

Best wishes to the readers at home                    Wilfried Jokat

August, 15th, 2009        Godthab Gulf        73°50’N  19°00’W        1°C