ABOARD THE JOIDES RESOLUTION, IN TRANSIT TO HOBART, TASMANIA– The work of the ship ended as quickly as it started nearly two months ago. We finished drilling Site 1361 and logged the hole. The drillers tripped 3500 meters of pipe and prepped it for storage as the ship will not drill again until July – off the coast of British Columbia. Everyone on board is absolutely brain dead from the non-stop grind of 12-hour shifts day after day. But all are happy as well. We’ve completed most of our objectives and made some exciting discoveries. When we did not meet with complete success it was always because of weather and ice, either encroaching sea ice or fields of icebergs so thick that we had no chance to pass.

Relaxing with some music after the work is done.

Now we have some days in transit. These days are filled with meetings to design our post-cruise research. We will all spend much more time at home working on the cores than our actual days at sea on this expedition. Some of the methods we will employ are expensive and difficult and we have recovered nearly 2000 meters of core. This means that we must carefully select the intervals we will study, so that we can answer the most important questions about Antarctic climate change as quickly as we can. For some of us, the analytical work will extend over the next 4 years. Then other scientists will work on these cores for decades to come. They will be stored in a vast library of ocean cores in College Station, Texas, at the IODP core repository where they are available to scientists from all over the world.

What I like most about these days in transit is going off shift. I no longer set my alarm to awake at 11PM. The two shifts mingle at meals and in the labs, almost as strangers at first as they have not seen much of each other for more than 7 weeks.

The whole team for Expedition 318. Photo courtesy of John Beck, IODP.

Working groups between the shifts assemble to design research strategies and timetables. I will lead a group that will make oxygen isotopic measurements of the small shells of amoeba-like organisms called foraminifera. Forams, as we call them, live for about 4 weeks during the brief Antarctic summer. They build their tiny shells out of calcium carbonate, the main mineral that makes up limestone. By measuring the ratios of two types of oxygen in the carbonate we can tell the temperature of the water in which the forams grew. We will make these analyses on forams that were living in Antarctic surface waters hundreds, thousands, and even millions of years ago to see how warm the water was next to the Wilkes Land coast. We already know from our microscope work on board that this part of Antarctica has been very warm at times, maybe 10 to 15 degrees centigrade warmer when we go back 35 million years. The foram work will help tell us exactly how warm the waters may have been during more recent periods when we know the ice sheet became much smaller. The results will help us predict the behavior of Antarctic ice in the future.

What a trip it’s been! I hope you’ve enjoyed these blogs. If you live in the Bay Area, please look for a notice about a talk I’ll likely give on this expedition in 6 months or so, after we’ve had a chance to start the shore-based part of the work. As we pull ever closer to Hobart we are very much aware that we are simply reaching the end of the beginning.

Christina and Joerg at the bow at sunset. Photo courtesy of John Beck, IODP.

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.

Captain Alex

Captain Alex talked with our life boat group, and explained the importance of the immersion suits, and that we are not expected to wear them if we are going into the life boats. Apparently there have been cases of individuals using them in life boats getting overheated and suffering from other problems as well. And there isn’t a whole lot of room to remove them when you are inside the life boat.

The life boat rations, in a lovely display the catering guys put together for us.

Since the life boat rations were going out of date and being replaced, we got to sample them at dinner. They have a pleasant smell that reminds me of coconut. The taste however is more like cardboard. And they are very dry. I hope there is a lot of water in the life boats if we need to use them!

We are finishing up at site U1341 tonight, and heading out to the last site on Bower’s Ridge. This one is the shallowest of the three on the ridge at 850 meters, so the pipe should be in place by morning, and it could be a quick turn around for each core recovery. We’ll have to be on our toes to get everything processed.

By popular demand I am posting links to some video blogs I’ve been putting together to document some of the living and working spaces on board the JOIDES Resolution. It is a very informal tour, originally intended for a small audience, but since so many people liked them there, here they are!

This is a tour of my stateroom:

This is a tour of the main deck living accommodations:

This is the rest of the main deck areas, laundry and galley:

This is the lower tween deck, and the entertainment facilities there:

And this is the forecastle deck, labs and office space:

I hope you enjoy these, and if there is something you want to see, let me know!