I met up with the team of researchers from the US Geological Survey who had been performing polar bear captures out of Barrow already for two weeks. That evening, after looking over our gear and getting caught up, I went over to see friends who recently moved to Barrow from Wyoming. It was great to hear about their new life in the area; moving from the mountains to the tundra is certainly a big change.

The next day I began flying in the helicopter for captures. We started in Barrow, fueled up in Deadhorse, and ended the day in Kaktovik, near the Canadian border – we covered almost the entire northern coast of Alaska. Since then we have been based out of Kaktovik, and we have had good weather and have been flying a lot.

It is great to be back out on the sea ice. Although I am out of place here, I really love this environment. In this picture we landed on a small pan of ice about twenty miles from shore; the pan was surrounded by pressure ridges and rubble from ice sheets smashing into each other.

The captures have been going well. We caught the largest bear I have seen, an adult male who weighed 1,147 lbs (I am not sure what the largest bear caught in the southern Beaufort has weighed). His neck was several times the size of my waist, and I could not fit both hands around his snout. It took several people to position him for measurements. We have caught several bears which were sampled in 2009, giving us excellent data on changes over time in the same individual.

We have also caught a lot of cubs-of-the-year, or COYs, including this litter of three. Cubs are born around January 1st. Litters of three are fairly uncommon for polar bears in Alaska, and usually include one cub that is noticeably smaller than the others – in this picture, the cub in the middle only weighed 12 lbs, nearly 10 lbs less than the other two.

One afternoon a young adult female polar bear wandered by the ship. She appeared out of the blowing snow and walked past the stern, fairly close to the ship. An hour later she reappeared and approached the ship, walking up the fantail until she was directly below the railing. Scientists and personnel from the ship were pressed at the railing above, and she just seemed to be curious, sniffing the wind and looking back at us, occasionally pawing the broken ice at the ship’s waterline.

This young adult female bear walked past the ship, eventually coming right up to the ship.

The polar bear, standing just below us at the stern of the ship.

The railing of the fantail where folks are standing is about 5 meters, 15 feet, above the ice where the bear was standing, at the aft end of the ship, the fantail. It was a wonderful chance for people to see this bear up close.

The wind finally dropped below 20 knots for a day and we flew for the bear – only to encounter heavy fog that prevented us from finding her. We located another bear that was a lower priority and we successfully captured her, yielding good data. The next day the fog dissipated and we flew for our priority bear again, but she had moved over 30 miles and we could not locate her until we received a satellite transmission at the end of the day. We remained in the area because this bear was one of the two top priority recaptures remaining, and we successfully located her twice, but both times she was traveling in large areas of broken ice which were unsafe for captures. The temperatures remained warm throughout this period, rarely dropping below 25 degrees; the water temperature remained warm as well, and sea ice simply was not forming very fast.

Poor ice near one of our priority bears.

This is a frustrating aspect of field work: success relies heavily on weather, and the bad luck of encountering stretches of poor weather can put an entire field season on hold. The only thing that can be done is planning. We planned a long field season to provide multiple opportunities to recapture each bear, and we planned on capturing secondary target bears as necessary. Thus, even though strong winds and fog really reduced our flight opportunities and poor ice reduced our capture opportunities, we had successful recaptures of target bears and we were able to process new bears as well.

The poor ice conditions we have encountered are remarkable. Air and water temperatures remained very warm throughout October, slowing the formation of new ice as winter begins. The current distribution of sea ice in the Beaufort is much more typical of late summer than early winter – we have not had to break heavy ice at all in the last 10 days. It is inaccurate to state that this warm October has been caused by climate change; climate refers to long-term patterns of average conditions, not day-to-day weather. Even in a world with an enhanced greenhouse gas effect, some autumns will be colder than normal and others will be warmer than normal. However, climate change is changing what is considered “normal.” As the earth’s climate warms, particularly in the Arctic, the type of weather we are experiencing may become common.

Graph from National Snow and Ice Data Center. Extent of sea ice over the entire Arctic is currently low compared to the 1979-2000 average, in fact, it is nearly as low as the same date in 2007, when the extent fell to a record low.

Today we disembarked from the ship, using helicopters to ferry people and luggage back into Barrow. Although the trip ended on a frustrating note, overall, it was a very exciting success. Every piece of data we gathered is unique – almost nothing is known about polar bears during this time of year, particularly bears out here on the pack ice far out at sea. I cannot wait to return to Laramie and receive data from our shore-based capture crew, which recaptured bears on the coast during the last several weeks. Before any in-depth analyses, it will be informative simply to compare data sets from the bears on ice to the bears on the coast, to see if differences are striking.

The gym is below the foc’sle, meaning it is below the main deck very near the bow. The floor in the gym slopes upward; I tried the treadmill for the first time, and decided to do a “hills” run. So, the already-leaning treadmill slowly tilted more then less, repeatedly, every one to two minutes, while I ran in place for 25 minutes. We were breaking moderate ice (probably around a foot thick) so the ship was rocking unpredictably as well, particularly when we encountered pieces of thick multi-year ice (many feet thick). By the time I stepped off the treadmill and tried to walk across the gym I was tilting pretty far myself. I walked slowly, from equipment to equipment, bracing myself as I went.

The gym is located near the bow of the ship; the bulkheads (walls) around the gym are on the outside of the hull, so the sounds of breaking ice can be incredibly loud. Last week I was in the gym when we were breaking very thick multiyear ice, and the sound was like being inside of a thundercloud. I would have had to yell to be heard by someone standing next to me, and the screeching and crunching completely drowned out my ipod. The large white tube in the corner runs from the foc’sle above to a room below the gym. The anchor chain is spooled below, where it is paid out or retrieved by a diesel powerplant up to the deck, where it hangs over the side and is attached to a 9000 lb anchor.

I have participated in other aspects of normal life aboard the ship as well. Last week I caught one of the movies shown nightly in the theatre: about 35 well-padded seats that rocked, as in a real theatre, facing a big-screen television. I got a haircut at the barbershop – there is even a striped pole in the hallway. “Pie in the face” voting took place across the ship for a week, and personnel who received the top 5 votes each took a turn sitting in a chair, surrounded by the crew, one night in the hangar. A vigorous auction took place for the right to be the person to actually sling the pie (gently; no broken noses were allowed). Last night I played bingo in the mess deck after dinner. Around 30 folks show up, once a week, and everyone plays three cards at once.

For most of my downtime I am trying to keep up with the course I am taking this fall (Biochemistry), reading research articles and preparing for an upcoming conference, and otherwise doing what I would be doing at my desk back in Laramie. Unfortunately space is fairly tight on the ship and desks are hard to come by so I do most of this work sitting on my bunk, which is just about 2 inches too small to allow me to sit all the way up.

I cannot view the dispatches myself, but it was passed on that someone asked about our rooms. Our room contains two bunkbeds (“racks”), four closet spaces (mine is visible at the right), and a chair. It is probably around 10 feet by 10 feet. The beds are narrow and long, and they lift for more storage space directly beneath the mattress. A vent in the ceiling delivers fresh air.

Recently, after the two days of transit the ship was hove to in very thick ice near Banks Island, which is in the southwestern corner of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

This view from the helicopter shows an area that may show up in a satellite image as mostly-covered with ice, but once we get out there and see it the ice pans are small and separated by open water, making it impossible to capture a bear.

This is the view from the portside main deck this morning, facing south. Thick, multi-year ice from the central Arctic flows south into this area, so the ice conditions are much better for captures. The ridges indicate areas where multiple ice pans have crashed together, and because they are thick pans the broken pieces stack up high where they catch windborne snow.

For captures, we need calm winds, good visibility, thick continuous ice, and a good bear location. Those factors came together to allow us to recapture an adult female we first sampled on May 8th. She was in excellent condition, carrying lots of food reserves in the form of body fat: she had about 6 cm of subcutaneous fat near her rump. All of the sampling went well, but it was slow, partially because of the cold. Temperatures were around 15 degrees (Fahrenheit) during the sampling, which took several hours. It was our first fairly cold day, and a good reminder of the difficulties we may encounter if it gets much colder. Temperatures have continued to drop; as I write, it is 8 degrees with a windchill of -11 degrees.

This 22-month old cub belonged to one the bears we recently recaptured.

This adult female had two 10-month old cubs with her. We waited in the helicopter as the bears walked past, until they got into a good position for a capture.

We last saw this 10 month old cub, a male, and his mother on April 25th. All of the re-sampling for both bears went well.

Despite some patchy fog, we had calm winds and sunshine for most of the capture operations. Once we are out of view of the ship, the ice just stretches out to the horizon. This is about as high as the sun gets, even in the middle of the day. On this day the sun rose around 1030am and set around 715pm.

After the recapture we were able to download data from the collar and several of the data loggers, including travel path of the bear, activity patterns, and body temperature. After spending the spring off the coast near Prudhoe Bay, this female and her cub walked about two hundred miles (just an estimate – we will have to calculate this precisely later) northwest, then spent much of September in the northern Chukchi Sea. We get so much valuable information from just one bear that as soon as preliminary data on the travel path, activity, and temperature are downloaded, it is easy to put off other work and immediately begin exploring the data. It is very exciting to consider why the bears traveled as they did by matching up patterns in the different sets of information.

After the recapture of the female and her cub we began moving the ship slightly south for another bear. As we cruised a strong wind picked up out of the east, blowing across several hundred miles of open water and generating big swells before reaching our position at the edge of the pack ice. The ice became thinner and more inconsistent, and was broken into small pans maybe 5-10 meters across. The big swells were tamped slightly by the ice, but for the most part they rolled right on under the ice, heaving it up and down. Standing on the bow and watching the ice move was like watching an enormous tapestry waving in the wind.

By the time we neared the bear’s last position around dinner last night even the thin newly-forming ice had broken up and we were mostly traveling in open water. The wind was a steady 30 knots and the swells were 2-4 meters, occasionally up to 5 meters (these were swells about 6-12 feet, up to 15 feet!). The ship’s hull was designed for breaking ice, which sacrifices some stability in swells; as a result, we were really rolling. I had to keep a hand on a rail walking around the ship, especially going up and down ladders – twice I knocked my head against a hatch going up a ladder as the ship swayed yesterday. Two of our lab chairs are on wheels – if no one was sitting in them we had to tie them to the counter, otherwise they would roll across the lab and run into people. The waves were too large to allow the ship to drift for the night, nor was there good ice nearby in which to hove to for the night. We had to decide to keep the ship traveling in a large circle for the night, or to move on. Since there was almost no chance of finding our bear on ice safe enough for capture operations, we decided we would turn north again towards a different bear and hopefully away from the worst of the weather.

After dinner the announcement came on “Weather Decks now secure to all traffic”, meaning that no personnel were allowed outside because of the weather. I spent the evening on the bridge, watching the bow rise up and crash down through waves. The ship is 399 feet long and 89.5 feet wide at the widest. The rocking seemed to happen in slow motion. The nose would rise and the wave trough would suddenly fall away, followed by a moment of lightweightedness as the ship fell downwards before the next swell rose up, and then the descent would stop suddenly as the nose crashed back into the water and whitewater shot out in all directions. Several of the swells put whitewater just barely over the bow onto the front deck (the fos’cle). No one knew for sure, but it seemed we were pitching somewhere around 15 degrees, maybe higher. A couple folks on the bridge told stories of taking rolls around 50 degrees during really bad weather – that kind of roll is difficult to imagine.

It was difficult to sleep because of the rolling of the ship, but by late morning the weather had subsided. By afternoon today the swells had come down quite a bit, allowing us to begin taking a direct route to our next bear rather than trying to skirt the weather. We are now headed south, towards the pack ice that runs parallel to the Alaskan coast. We have a cluster of bears to recapture in that area and we hope to fly for the first of the group tomorrow.

Several nights ago as we were breaking thin ice a family group of polar bears was spotted. An announcement was made and the ship slowed, allowing personnel an opportunity to see the bears as we cruised past. It was an adult female and two cubs, both about 10 months old. It was interesting to see them – they may have come from Alaska or Russia, or even Greenland or Canada; they may go to land next summer, or they may spend their entire lives out here on the ice.

*I am not sure if anyone has left comments on recent posts, but if so, my apologies for not responding; I can email these dispatches to the Exploratorium but there is almost no internet connectivity on the ship and I cannot actually go online to see the website myself.

The cub trailing behind was very interested in the ship and wanted to walk over and examine it – the mother corralled it and the family group continued on.

Because we are so far north, sunrise is already very late – occurring today at 1007am. Because we are so far west, almost to the international date line, sunset is also surprisingly late. I took this photo after 8pm. Daylight is visible through the porthole on a door, but the interior is already lit with overnight red lighting.

Unexpected aspects of life at home also come up. Tonight after dinner, I managed to watch some of the Minnesota Vikings – Green Bay Packers football game (I am from Minnesota). A satellite television signal is received on the ship with the Armed Forces Network, which shows some sports. The reception can be pretty sporadic however, and we lost signal in the 4th quarter. The Vikings were ahead…I hope they won.

I have begun to develop a mental image of the layout of the compartments of the ship (and, thankfully, I can finally find my room without the help of someone nice enough to stop and ask if I am lost). Everything is close here – the mess deck, our berths, our lab space – but connected by a maze of hallways and steep stairs. Walking around outside on the upper decks gives the impression of close-set apartment buildings in a city skyline.

The skyline, viewed standing on a weatherdeck near the bridge facing towards the back of the ship (aft).

Standing over the bridge and looking down on the bow of the ship as we slowly break ice in the evening. The red flag is flown in windy and icy conditions, to judge how the wind may affect the path of the ship and the movement of the ice.

We flew several days in the last week, locating bears for recapture. However most bears were traveling on thin, newly forming sea ice, which is unsafe for capture operations. We really need some colder weather to thicken the ice. Most days have been around 30 degrees (Fahrenheit), although the last two days have periodically dipped down to 21 degrees. Two days ago we finally had our first recapture. We relocated an adult female with her 10 month-old cub as they were traveling on good, thick ice. The capture went well, and we were able to repeat all of the sampling from her first capture, which occurred in May. It was excellent to see this bear again and collect samples that will tell us what she has been doing over the last 5 months. In overall appearance, she and her cub had good body condition. After breaking ice for several days to reach these bears, we will keep the ship in this general area hopefully as colder weather helps expand and solidify the ice pack.

We had a successful capture today as well. This female cub is only 10 months old but already weighs 211 pounds.

It is remarkable that the lack of good, thick ice has been such a problem for us. It was a problem that we considered before this trip but we did not think it would be so common. The ship has a chart of the Arctic that was printed in 1954, and it shows the average location of the ice edge in summer – several hundred miles south of our current position. Until recent years our current position would have been deep into the Arctic ice, rather than near the edge in patchy ice.

This morning at breakfast we received word that we were within 20 miles of the last known location of a bear we are targeting for capture. Over the previous 24 hours we had cruised through several hundred miles of open water, and we hoped to be approaching the edge of the retreated sea ice; however, with only 20 miles between us and the bear, it was only open water in sight. We cannot dart a bear on small pieces of ice with much open water in the area – there is a possibility that a bear may run into the water to swim away, which is dangerous if the animal is going under the anesthetic. However, by the end of breakfast ice had been spotted, and we were still hopeful.

By 9am I went up to the bridge to see what the conditions looked like and await the daily flight briefing. This far north and west, sunrise is late – official sunrise today at our location was 947am. Thus the bridge was still dark and all the lights were dim red. This provides enough light for crew members to perform their jobs but it doesn’t force their eyes to adjust to bright light, which reduces their vision in the dark. Two huge floodlights lit the path in front of the icebreaker. Loose pieces of newly-formed ice, most no larger than several feet across, gently rolled over waves, but there was no thick ice in sight. As we moved west by southwest the ice seemed to get a little thicker so the flight briefing went on as planned and by just about dawn, the first helicopter launched.

The helicopter deck of the ship. To the right is the hangar. After landing, temporary wheels are attached to the skids of each helicopter and they are rolled from this deck into the hangar.

The first helicopter, carrying scientists from USGS and USFWS, radio-tracked our target bear and made visual contact. Unfortunately, the bear was standing on a piece of thick ice around 15 meters across, which was much too small for a safe darting operation. The helicopter gained altitude and scouted the surrounding area but did not see any promising ice. They returned to the ship and we had to make the decision to forego this bear and start cruising towards the next animal. Temperatures have been hovering in the low 30s (Fahrenheit), which is simply too warm for much formation of new ice. We need our bears to move onto thicker ice, or for the temperatures to drop so the new ice increases in thickness. The next target bear is over 100 miles to the north and seems to be quite a distance in from the ice edge, hopefully on thick ice remaining from last winter.

As we began cruising north from the location with poor ice, the ice immediately became thicker. Looking aft from the helicopter deck, we are leaving a trail of open water through about 3-6 inches of sea ice. By now I could walk across the ice and in an emergency, a helicopter could probably land on it. However, conditions still are not good enough for a capture operation.

As we began cruising north I took my lunch to a port-side lower deck and watched the ice go by; almost immediately, it began getting thicker. By evening we will be in position to launch for the next bear, but we will not have enough daylight. Thus we plan to launch at dawn tomorrow, and we hope to find thick ice from last winter to work on.

Standing on the bow of the boat you can hear the ice breaking; up to now, it has mostly been a gentle swish of thin ice getting pushed underwater. Turning around, you are faced with this imposing wall topped by the bridge.

It took several hours to sort, weigh, and tag all of the personal luggage going out to the ship. It took several more hours to ferry the personnel by helicopter, and the luggage by landing craft. I stayed with the luggage to help keep it organized and insure that no pieces were mixed in with the outgoing science party. The day was windy with several snow squalls, and the landing craft rolled and crashed over large swells during the 20 minute ride out – it was a lot of fun.

Wearing a cold-water survival suit, waiting on the beach for the landing craft launched from the icebreaker.

It was surreal to pull up next to the icebreaker (399 feet long) in the launching craft (perhaps 35 feet long). Our little boat was getting pummeled by the waves – I had to brace myself against the handrail during the entire ride – and spray from smashing into waves had been washing over the open deck. However, as we pulled into the leeward side of the icebreaker, the immense ship sheltered us from the wind. I’m not sure, but the icebreaker must be at least 6 stories tall; it was like pulling the boat up to the base of an immense cliff. The Coast Guard personnel threw heavy lines up to the ship and secured the boat then we clambered up a rope ladder and onto deck. A different crew member immediately helped us gather our luggage, and showed us to our rooms.

The rest of the day was spent organizing (no surprise there). We hurriedly unpacked our own gear into our rooms then began the long process of finding all of the project gear in the cargo hold and bringing it up to the lab spaces. Somehow, in the narrow hallways and cramped stairs (more like ladders) of the ship, everyone managed to maneuver their equipment into the labs.

We left the Barrow area and cruised west then north, to avoid the waters near Barrow during whaling season. We then traveled east then north again; by this morning we were passing – and occasionally crushing – large pieces of floating ice. We have not cruised through any solid ice yet, only fields of floating ice. This morning I ducked out onto a side deck before breakfast to take this picture of dawn. Temperatures have been hovering around 30 degrees (Fahrenheit).

This morning we launched for captures for the first time. As we flew to the north, trying to radio track some bears for recaptures, I looked back and saw the icebreaker sitting in the trail of open water it had created. The ship that looked awesomely large from the water looked small from above. The deck from which we launched is visible at the stern. Unfortunately, because we did not encounter large areas of solid pack ice as we flew there were no safe places to perform captures. After short flights, we returned to the ship. We are currently underway and we plan to cruise north for about two days, towards different collared bears, in hopes of working on better sea ice.

The pace of work has continued to be frenetic – our lab is finally up and running, and all of the instruments seem to have made their journey intact. All of the capture equipment was in place for the flight today, and hopefully we will use it soon. Tonight is chance to catch up on some rest.