This short video sums up pressure ridges. The pressure ridges we explored here form where a large mass of sea ice buckles under pressure as it makes contact with land (in this case, Ross Island where McMurdo Station and Scott Base are located). The wind, tides, and sun are all variables that constantly change these ridges. With Mt. Erebus looming over the station, the views were quite dramatic. Surprisingly, every view along our ~2 mile walk seemed different! It was like walking through a park of ice sculptures! Like identifying shapes in clouds, we were able to see a dog, person, peace sign, and set of waves. I hope you enjoy this short video with photos from this little adventure onto the ice!

Music by Wayne Grim.

A few of our several iceberg choices in Bay of Sails.

Icebergs are moved by wind and currents, and when they come in contact with the seafloor, plough across it leaving a swath of destruction. Cape Evans, on the eastern side of McMurdo Sound, is bathed by plankton-rich water from the open Ross Sea, providing a good food resource to benthic communities during the summer months. But at Bay of Sails, on the western side of the sound, the water has spent a long time circulating in darkness under the thick ice of the permanent Ross Ice Shelf, so it is very oligotrophic, or food-poor. I am interested in the differences between how these two communities recover from iceberg disturbances.

Though the benthic communities locally are not eating well, we are!

To start this effort, we did a reconnaissance helicopter flight. Scottie, our pilot for the day, flew us in beautiful loops and spirals over the dozen icebergs scattered in the bay. We were looking for a berg that was grounded on the seafloor, was in about 50 m water depth, and was close enough to other icebergs that we had alternate target options. Since the bathymetry in this area is poorly known, I had to guess at depths based on distance from shore and iceberg height. I selected a moderate-size, tabular-looking berg about 2 km from shore. It was a good choice, but a better one was about a km further offshore, as we discovered from our initial survey with an extremely high tech weight on a tape measure.

Marco and Henry think a better iceberg is that way.

However, the helo landing site is that way.

Okay, I guess we’ll go home for now.

Parallel with selecting the camp location, we have been packing up camp gear. 335 pounds of food, 330 pounds of water, sleeping bags good to minus 40, tents, fuel for the stove and heaters, sleds, safety supplies, another 1485 pounds of stuff. And then there is the science equipment – drills, electronic gear, the ROV itself, power supplies, batteries and generators, all in all 760 pounds of toys. Then there is the 1000 pounds of people. Not to say we are fat, but several of us are up to three desserts per night. Yow!

How much stuff will fit in one helicopter? 1200 lbs in an A-Star, and 2000 lbs in a Bell212.

All of this is sorted into classifications of Can Freeze, Do Not Freeze, and Keep Frozen (some of the food). Bags and boxes are weighed and tagged. Hazardous material is certified as safe to fly. Much of the Can Freeze camp gear has gone already in an overland (well, over-sea-ice) traverse to a fueling depot about 10 km from Bay of Sails. The helicopters will carry it the rest of the way to us.

Like an n-dimensional puzzle, it all unfolds to a full field camp, dwarfed by the landscape.

My bedroom.

It’s a little nerve-wracking, making sure we remember everything, and enough of it. I have lists, and lists of lists, and I wake up in the middle of the night to make more lists. Remembering to bring all the things we needed to Antarctica was bad enough, but the field camp list must be pared to a minimum yet not leave out anything. We will get a resupply flight after a week, to bring us more water, so we do have that opportunity to fix any bads, but it would be very unproductive, not to say embarrassing, to have forgotten the batteries to the joystick to drive the ROV.

Team SCINI at field camp I: Kamille, Dustin, Isabelle, Francois, Stacy and Bob. Doh, Dustin has forgotten his black Antarctic uniform pants!

Tonight as the sun dips to touch the horizon I think that we have all we need to survive. But I am worried about the engineers getting their stuff packed; they are still out doing tests at 10 pm, 12 hours from when it must be on the helo pad. I am beginning to think that procrastination and engineering must go hand in hand. I think a walk up Ob Hill is in order to reduce my stress!

The view of Erebus and Terror from the top of Ob Hill, colored by a midnight sun.

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.

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.