Transiting back to Site U1359
Position: 64º 34’S, 140º 30’E
Water Depth: 3700 meters
The scene outside: 2 days of storms and lots of icebergs

ABOARD THE JOIDES RESOLUTION, OFF THE COAST OF WILKES LAND, ANTARCTICA– Our latest drilling target is in an area where sediments that document the transition of Antarctica from the “Hothouse” to the “Icehouse” can be easily reached at shallow depth beneath the seafloor. We drilled for 18 hours and then had to pull the drill pipe up out of the hole and reposition the ship to avoid a large iceberg that was heading straight for us. When the iceberg had passed the weather started to deteriorate. Our forecast was for 60 kt winds and big seas so we headed north out of “iceberg city” to ride the storm out in deep water away from icebergs and sea ice. The forecast was true to its word – we had waves up to 30 feet and winds over 60 kts for more than 24 hours. But we had great iceberg viewing on the way to our WOW (Waiting On Weather) point so I’ll write something about them and how they fit in with our project.

The Antarctic ice sheet is always accumulating new snow that gradually turns to ice. For the ice sheet to remain the same size it must either melt or release ice to the ocean as icebergs. In parts of Antarctica some of the ice is in fact melting but most of the ice loss that maintains the continent at its present state occurs through the calving of icebergs. Most icebergs calve off of ice tongues and ice shelves – areas of concentrated ice flow at the coast. Imagine that the ice is draining off of the high parts of the continent by flowing down small ice drainages to form mighty rivers – but rivers of ice in this case. These vast rivers move slowly, only a few 10’s to 1000’s of meters each year. When they reach the coast, the ice flows out into the ocean where it begins to float wherever the water is deep enough. In some cases, this is where the water is over 500 meters deep and the ice is over 560 meters thick. Floating ice shelves or ice tongues are influenced by winds and ocean currents. They begin to melt if the water is warm enough but they mostly breakup to form icebergs.

Many of the icebergs here off Wilkes Land came from the Ross Ice Shelf – the world’s largest ice shelf. It is over 1500 km away in the Ross Sea but icebergs travel great distances in the Southern Ocean. The water is cold and they drift with the ocean currents, for decades in some cases. As they drift, they melt a bit below the waterline and become rounded. Sometimes they flip over and this rounded part is then visible. Icebergs often collide and gouge away at each other or they list over at an angle and slowly fall apart. This means that icebergs come in all shapes, sizes, and textures.

The biggest iceberg we’ve seen was over 20 km long.

Icebergs come in all colors, from the pure white of fresh snow to the deepest blue of pure crystalline ice from far below the surface of the ice sheet.

Icebergs come in all shapes, sizes, and textures.

A penguin on a growler (a small iceberg).

The ice at the base of the ice sheet often carries sediments: boulders, gravels, cobbles, and sands. When these parts break off and begin to float they form “dirty” bergs with dark rocky layers intermixed with the clear blue ice. The debris that falls from these dirty bergs accumulates in sediments at the seabed. When we see gravels or sands in otherwise fine-grained sediments, we know this debris was transported out over the ocean by ice. In fact, the presence or absence of ice-rafted debris is something we keep close track of in the cores we are collecting on this trip – this tells us whether Antarctica was generating lots of icebergs and therefore had at least some kind of ice sheet in the past. Conversely, when we see sediments that do not contain this debris we know we are looking at a record from a time when Antarctica was much warmer.

In the foreground, a dirty iceberg.

We’ve seen over 400 icebergs in the past 2 days.

As I write, the storm has abated and we are transiting back to our drill site.

Dawn at 4:30.

At Site U1359, Hole U1359B,
Position: 64º 54.25’S, 143º 57.63’E
Water Depth: 3100 meters

ABOARD THE JOIDES RESOLUTION, OFF THE COAST OF WILKES LAND, ANTARCTICA– Hi everyone! As we approach our 2000th meter of drilling I thought I would change things up a bit with this blog and send along some photos of the birds we’ve been seeing. The Southern Ocean is the coldest and windiest on Earth, but it also one of the most bountiful. During the 3 or 4 months of long days and short nights, the “farm” operates 24/7. The plants that live in the sunlit waters here are nourished by nutrients that mix upwards from the deep sea and go into overdrive building their cells. It’s easier for nutrients to mix upwards into the sunlit upper waters here simply because the water column is “isothermal”. This means that we see very little variation in the temperature of the sea between the surface and the bottom waters over 3000 meters below us. It is all close to 0 degrees Celsius. This means that it takes very little energy to move dense cold water from the deep upwards because the surface water is also cold and is almost as dense. So the plants have everything they need. The wind and circulation drive the mixing, which brings in the nutrients, and the sun keeps the farm growing nearly 24 hours every day. Plants (mostly single-celled protists called diatoms) grow fast and the small plankton that eat the diatoms grow fast as well. Which brings us to the birds…..

Albatrosses in a storm.

Our ship is constantly surrounded by Albatrosses, Petrels, and Skuas. Sometimes we see more than 100 birds surrounding the ship. They swoop and dive, looking for food in the water, either plankton or small fish, or perhaps they think we are land. We haven’t seen one try to rest on the ship yet. In fact the Albatrosses rarely set down at any time. They fly 1000’s of miles from their breeding colonies and are at sea for months and even years at a time.

Here are some photos of the seabirds we’ve seen so far.

These first two are of Black-browed Albatrosses (Thalassarche melanophrys). They live throughout the Southern Ocean and breed in places like the Falkland Islands and South Georgia. They can live to be as old as 70 years and spend long periods of time at sea, even encircling the globe. They feed on krill and small fish – that in turn eat diatoms and smaller plankton.

Black Browed Albatross

Black Browed Albatross

The most common bird we saw at our drill sites close to the Antarctic continent were the Pintados, also known as Cape Petrels (Daption capense capense). The name Pintado comes from the Spanish word for “painted”. They live throughout the Southern Ocean, mainly eating krill, especially on and near the continental shelf of Antarctica in summer. A 2009 census estimates there are over 2 million Cape Petrels alive today.

Cape Petrel (Pintado)

Cape Petrel (Pintado)

Cape Petrel (Pintado)

We’ve also been surrounded the past few days by Southern Giant Petrels (Macronectes giganteus). These are indeed big birds….females can weigh up to 18 pounds. Sometimes they are called “stinkers” as they can spit a foul-smelling liquid at predators or when they are perturbed.

Southern Giant Petrel

Southern Giant Petrel

I hope you enjoy these photos! I’ll get back to our science and progress next time and I’ll try to knock out least one more video blog. We are VERY busy with work here now but it all very exciting.

Position: 66º 33’ 39’’S, 136º 59’E
Water Depth: 1000 meters
Exact Location: The Antarctic Circle

ABOARD THE JOIDES RESOLUTION, OFF THE COAST OF WILKES LAND, ANTARCTICA– Yes, we crossed the Antarctic Circle today! It is perhaps only the 3rd time this ship has ever done so. All points south of the Antarctic Circle experience at least one day every year of total darkness and likewise one day every year when the sun never completely sets. We are now in early February so the sun does set but only for 4 hours and it never gets really dark. As a member of the night shift out here, I love this…I get up at 11PM, come on shift at midnight. The sun sets around 1 AM and rises again around 5 AM. I get to see both and when the weather is good, the colors are spectacular.

Moon set behind our drilling derrick.

Dawn at 0330 in the AM.

We are now working at one of our shallow continental shelf sites, called U1358. We just finished the major site for which I am the lead scientist. This site was cored very successfully. The water is a 1000 meters deep and the spot we cored is like a big dish at the seafloor, with lots of small sediment particles drifting into it.

Here you can see the annual layers in the sediment cores we collected.

The sediments accumulate at a rate of 2 cm every year and leave an annual layer – a summer deposit made up of microscopic plants and a winter layer made up of dust and silts carried by the wind and the ice. We can see each layer and each layer represents one year. It looks as though we can count these layers back over 10,000 years. The record may not be perfectly continuous, we don’t know yet, but we do know that we have 470 meters of layered mud to work on and that it will tell how the sea ice and temperature of Antarctic surface and deep waters has changed on a year-to-year basis for many thousands of years…..

The core sampling table where this bag holds the last of more than 2300 samples taken from one Hole.

We save EVERYTHING There are more boxes on this ship than you would believe.

Everyone on board worked long hours to get this site completed, many for 18 to 20 hours each day. So, when we have a transit day to another site we get to rest, but we also have a chance to cross the Antarctic Circle. Everyone is excited and a bit relaxed, both at the same time! The weather is sunny and warm today but tonight we expect a big storm to begin, one with winds gusting to over 60 kts and waves as high as 25 feet. It might last 2 to 3 days, a problem for us as it is difficult to work in such stormy conditions. I’ll let you know how it turns out!

This is mainly the night shift at the bow of the Joides Resolution as we cross the Antarctic Circle.

Your correspondents Rob and Christina on the Antarctic Circle.

When we left McMurdo it was a fairly overcast day. We returned to Pegasus Field (the same airstrip on which we arrived on the C-17) and boarded a C-130 Hercules to fly to the pole.

Three C-130’s side-by-side at the airfield. They are the only heavy-lift aircraft equipped with skis in the world and they are operated by the New York Air National Guard.

The C-130 as we boarded the plane.

Soon after we took off I saw something in the snow from the window and I took a photograph of it. When I zoomed in on the photo I discovered that it was a crashed plane!

“The Pegasus” wreck (in upper left part of the photo) from the air.

It turns out that what I had photographed was “The Pegasus.” “The Pegasus” was a C-121 Lockheed Constellation aircraft which crashed on Oct 8, 1970 in horrendous weather. None of the 80 people on board were injured. The plane had passed the “PSR” (“Point of Safe Return”). Many of the planes which fly from New Zealand to McMurdo do not have enough fuel to get back to New Zealand if they cannot land at McMurdo, so a decision gets made mid-flight whether or not it is safe to proceed to McMurdo. Because the weather in McMurdo is so changeable, “boomerangs” back to New Zealand are quite common. I have actually boomeranged twice in my six trips to Antarctica. In fact, once we must have come close to passing the “PSR” because we ended up having to land in Dunedin (on the southern tip of New Zealand), since we did not have enough fuel to safely get back to the more northern Christchurch airport.

And that’s how the ice runway being used at McMurdo is called “Pegasus”, named in honor of this crashed plane.

A close-up of the Pegasus wreck. Photo courtesy of sandwichgirl.

Another view of the wreck. Photo courtesy of sandwichgirl.

For more on the plane and its story, click here.

As we flew onward, I took a photograph of a GPS. It is roughly a 3-hour flight, and as you can see, we were indeed headed southwards.

The weather at the South Pole was great. Having just arrived, here I am (in the middle) with colleagues, some who are leaving and others who are arriving.

Soon after I arrived, I took this photograph of a spectacular sundog (caused by ice crystals in the air). You can see part of the “parhelion” (the horizontal line), which was particularly bright on this day.

As you can tell, it can be an adventure getting to the pole. For me, everything went on schedule, and it still took a week! Now it’s been several days since I arrived, and the weather in McMurdo has been pretty bad of late. A C-17 boomeranged from Christchurch to McMurdo a couple of days ago, and additional attempts yesterday and today have had to be canceled due to weather. The flights from McMurdo to the South Pole have also had to be canceled due to weather – they have been trying hard to get a flight to pole because there is a person here who got sick and they need to do an emergency medical evacuation but they have so far been unable to. It looks like a plane just took off again headed this way, so I hope the folks waiting to leave will get out of here tonight. Currently IceCube has close to 10 people trying to fly to Antarctica from New Zealand, and close to 10 people trying to get to New Zealand from either McMurdo or the South Pole.

View of Antarctica from above the South Pole. Notice that the tip of South America is the only bit of land showing in this view. The body of water surrounding Antarctica you see in this image is the Southern Ocean.

This time around the Drake Passage greeted us with up to 50ft waves and up to 100 knot wind gusts (1 knot equals 1 nautical mile per hour), enough to make this boat feel like a small cork bobbing around in an endless ocean. Walking straight is no option, nor is getting much work done. To make sure everything and everyone is safe scientists, crew, and support staff make sure that everything from computers to chairs and the two helicopters we have on board are tided down to the boat. As the ship rolls, sometimes 16 degrees from side to side, waves break over the side and occasionally drown the deck underneath a wall of water. Our ship the NBP is built to withstand this kind of punishment, and she and us continue our trek towards Antarctica.

Water spilling over the side of the ship as it rolls in 50ft seas across the Drake Passage. Compare this image to one taken on a calm day (next photo). It really was a wall of water coming down on us.

A calm day.

Debra, Laura, and Mattias trying on survival wetsuits. These suits (nicknamed ‘gumby suits’) are meant to keep us warm in the event that the boat capsizes.

Birds, which form an important part of the marine food web partly because of their consumption of fish and other marine life, are on the other hand old hats at dealing with the storm, carefully dodging breaking waves and using the strong winds to glide gracefully in the air. As we move South the species composition of birds sighted from the ship changes. Wandering, Black Browed, and Sooty Albatrosses are common near South America. Soon Cape Petrels start to appear, along with Southern Giant Petrels. Down in the Antarctic we’ll hopefully be seeing Antarctic Terns, Petrels, and Wilson’s Storm Petrels, graceful birds named after their affinity for stormy weather that seem to tip toe on the water’s surface.

Wandering albatross gliding over the waves. These are the world’s largest birds, with a wingspan of up to 142 inches (363 cm). That’s almost 12 feet! They spend almost their entire life at sea, riding the strong winds of the Southern Ocean.

As we cross we hope conditions will calm down and look forward to reaching the Weddell Sea, the sea East of the Antarctic Peninsula, and eventually the Larsen Ice Shelf System. On our way we will be recovering a ‘whale bone lander’, a metal frame that has been placed at the bottom of the ocean in 600m of water, and on which bones from different species of whales have been placed. Biological oceanographer Craig Smith from the University of Hawaii is interested in the organisms that colonize bones in the deep sea, including Osedax, the bone-eating worm. More on that in the next dispatch. Our group, which focuses on phytoplankton (microscopic algae) in the water column (between the surface and the ocean bottom) will be starting to sample the surface water to see what lives in the uppermost layer of the ocean. Like the birds, the phytoplankton community changes as we move south, and this can have important consequences for the rest of the food chain.

We began drilling the glacier ice and despite the weather conditions the day started well as we were recovering beautiful, clean, bubbly glacier ice. But soon the borehole reached a small sandy-pebbly layer within the ice and the pace of drilling came to a crawl. Drilling sediment rich ice releases enough heat to melt the ice between the sand grains. When the drill slows down the ice quickly refreezes and makes a sand ice slurry (yes, I referred to it as “crap” in the video) which adheres to the auger like cement making cleaning an arduous process.

The round depression on the top of the recovered slurry core was caused by the down-hole vacuum which assists in removing broken up rock and ice cemented debris created during drilling. Material not removed by the vacuum is hopefully recovered via use of the core barrel as shown in this video. After a few more cleaning runs with the vacuum and core barrel, we were back into clean ice once again!

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.

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.

Aerosonde on launch vehicle at Pegasus ice runway.

We’ve had a very successful field season. We flew a total of 16 Aerosonde flights, 8 of which were “science” flights to the Terra Nova Bay polynya we are studying. We logged a bit more than 130 flight hours and flew a total of almost 7000 miles (too bad I can’t count those towards my frequent flyer miles).

Aerosonde in flight over Pegasus ice runway.

The weather we’ve observed at Terra Nova Bay has been nothing short of amazing. On yesterday’s flight we flew through hurricane strength winds as strong as 90 mph. The wind was so strong that one of the planes came back with a coating of salt on the wings. We think this salt was from sea spray over the open water in the polynya. This is really quite impressive, since we never flew lower than 300 feet above the surface. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be in an environment where the temperature is below 0 degrees F, the wind is blowing at hurricane strength, and the air is filled with sea spray hundreds of feet in the air.

Wind whipped water and sea ice in the polynya.

Wind whipped water and sea ice in the polynya.

Another observation I was amazed by was a very abrupt increase in wind speed over a very short distance. In the span of just 4 miles we flew from light winds that were blowing at less than 10 miles per hour to winds raging at more than 70 mph. To be honest I was worried for our little Aerosondes, but they handled the ferocious winds with no problem. In fact, other than the first plane that crashed two weeks ago we haven’t lost any other planes. This was better then we had expected, as we thought we’d lose anywhere from 2 to 4 of the planes we brought down with us.

The strong winds did present some problems for our planes. The maximum air speed of the planes is about 60 mph, so when we pointed them into winds stronger then that they were actually blown backwards. This made navigating the planes to the places we wanted to go a real challenge. Despite that we managed to collect almost all of the data we had hoped to.

Speaking of planes, we held a contest on the base to name our 4 Aerosondes. The only rule we imposed for the contest was that the names had to be of Antarctic explorers. The winning names were Scott, Mawson, Shackleton, and Bancroft. Scott was named after Robert Falcon Scott, the second man to reach the South Pole. Scott, along with his party died on their return trip from the pole. Appropriately, our one plane that didn’t make it back was named Scott. Mawson was named after Douglas Mawson, an Australian explorer that spent two winters at Cape Denison, one of the windiest places on the planet. Like Terra Nova Bay, Cape Denison is battered by fierce katabatic winds. Mawson’s book on his experiences there was named the “Home of the Blizzard” and is a fantastic story. Shackleton was named after Ernest Shackleton, whose tale of Antarctic survival is one of the truly great Antarctic stories. Finally, Bancroft was named after Ann Bancroft, the woman who led the first all female ski expedition to the South Pole.

Interesting patterns in sea ice.

In the next day or two we’ll finish packing up all of our gear and get ready to return to the much warmer weather of the mid-latitudes. I’m looking forward to seeing my wife and 7 month old daughter soon.