Dispatch 23: Ice is Nice     Print

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Zoe Sandwith

August 24, 2013

Today was the largest and longest scheduled day of ice work. We not only deployed an Ice Tethered Profiler, but also a wave buoy, the O-Buoy, an Ice Mass Balance Buoy, an Ice Tethered Micro mooring, an Arctic Ocean Flux buoy, and  4 GPS buoys. As this was happening, we had teams taking ice cores for measuring thickness, temperature, salinity, density, iron, and microbial communities. The whole operation, from reconnaissance flight to wrap up was just shy of 12 hours. Things were a little hairy at the beginning, with some uncertainty about the weather: fog was threatening to move in, and it was snowing for a couple of hours in the morning. All told it was pretty nice working conditions in the end - a persistent cloud cover kept the glare off the ice and snow minimized and it wasn’t too cold out. The members of the ice party were all glad to get back to the ship at the end of the day, all looking a bit rosy cheeked and windswept.