I’m back home in Fairbanks now and I’ve finished my first day back at West Valley High School. I had a great trip but I never saw a polar bear but it seems like everyone else did. Holly saw one when she looked out her window just as she woke up. She said it drifted by as if she were still dreaming. I thought about questioning her state of alertness at 5:30 in the morning but the Captain saw it from the bridge as well. I didn’t wake up until 5:45. Later in the day at Barrow, Harper got a truck ride up around Point Barrow itself and saw a whale just twenty feet off shore, a snowy owl sitting patiently along the beach and a polar bear drift by on the ice. I was taking a nap in the Barrow gym. These two lost opportunities just give credence to the old saying, “If you snooze, you loose”.

Shortly after I did wake up I had to start cleaning up the room as the Coast Guard does not provide maid service. I ran my sheets down to the laundry room to hopefully beat the rush as I heard there would be almost thirty people leaving the ship. I was just in time as there was still one washing machine left. The experienced Coast Guard people had gotten there plenty early. Many had been on the ship for much longer than I and they didn’t want to take any chance at not getting to shore. I got the sheets into the dryer before breakfast and shortly after breakfast I folded them stuffed my duffle bag.

I felt a warm glow of content inside as I stuffed my bag because I never had to wear my long johns or wool pants. The weather was relatively wonderful the whole week.

After our room passed inspection I carried my bags to the hanger where all the outgoing personnel were briefed on the upcoming ride back to shore. I felt confidence in the civilian pilot as I over heard him talk to one of the ship’s officers about the polar bear surveys he was recently flying out of Prudhoe Bay. I felt that if he’s good enough to chase polar bears all over the ice pack he could safely get me the few miles to shore.

The civilian Jet Ranger helicopter provided a much quieter ride with a better view than did the Coast Guard copter on the way out. I guess the difference is that the Coast Guard aircraft was all business and no effort was made to provide the padded seats the civilian version did.

Once safely off loaded in Barrow we made our way to the Barrow gym where we were provided with cots to either nap or for overnight for those with Alaska Airlines reservations for Thursday. Almost as soon as we dropped our bags off at the gym we took off walking to the Inupiat Heritage center.

After going through the center again looking for tidbits of information might have missed on the first pass Rob Palomares and I went to Browers restaurant for a sandwich. The restaurant is in the building that was built in 1883. Over it’s life time it served as staging area for early Arctic exploration, a home for stranded whalers and a trading post. I had read about it as a kid in Charles Brower’s book, “Fifty years Below Zero.” Now that I’ve seen Barrow I’ll have to reread the book.

When we made our way through the chilling wind back to the warm gym I plopped down on a cot with my full belly and fell into a long slumber and missed seeing the polar bear mentioned before.

When I finally managed to come out of my coma I slowly put on some running clothes and did a quick jog around Barrow for my last chance to see a polar bear and the highlights of the town. A nice long shower afterwards put me in a good mood to get to the Alaska Airlines terminal and head for warm and sunny Fairbanks.

~John

A photo taken today, August 13, 2008 at 7:00am Alaska time from the bridge of the USGC Healy.
Location: 71 31.9N 156 13.2W
Air Temp: 38.2F

I finally saw a seal. I couldn’t get a picture because I dropped my little camera earlier today so you, the reader, will have to take my word for it. I was standing on the rear deck just after the last mooring deployment for the day when Holly pointed it out to me. I was looking forward and the seal was on an ice cake behind us.

Today was certainly the most relaxed day for Harper’s group. Mathew and I started cleaning up the storage bins down in the hold to make room for empty shipping crates. The mooring instruments all came packed in solid wood crates and they have to be saved for next year when the instruments are pulled up. While we sweated away at hard labor (I’m joking), Harper worked on wrapping up documentation. After lunch I was fortunate enough to listen in on an interview with Dr. Phil McGillivary. Phil works for the Coast Guard on a number of various projects and he is a treasure trove of information about the ice breakers that come to the Arctic from all over the world. He was saying that China now has an ice breaker that is currently on a shake down cruise and that other nations are also becoming first time builders of them. He was explaining that as the polar ice cap melts, more nations are looking to the Arctic for potential energy sources.

We are currently steaming back towards Barrow. Dr. Bob Pickart’s group from WHOI (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute) deployed their last mooring so we are heading back. We will stop to recover a whale hydrophone that we had to leave under the ice on the way out. I’m seeing more ice out of my window so I’m worried the whale mooring still be under too much ice to do the recovery. However, the ice is not uniformly distributed. It seems like it clumps up into large mile wide sized bunches in some places and other places have a relatively light ice cover. We just have to hope its relatively ice free.

Kate will deploy one more whale hydrophone tomorrow morning at 6:00 a.m. and then we have to race back to Barrow to make our connections with Alaska Airlines. Rumor has it that all the hotels are filled and if we get stuck in Barrow we will have to sleep on the High School gym floor. That sounds almost better than going back to work so I’m not too worried.

This has been a great trip and I am deeply grateful to Harper and the Coast Guard for the opportunity to ride along. The scenery has been fantastic. The image of the white and brilliant blue sea ice floating in the dark blue ocean is burned into my memory.

The people in the science crew and the Coast Guard have been great as well. The men and women on board the ship have been very open and hospitable at every turn. I’ve enjoyed getting to talk to everyone and learn about their lives on board this ship.

Tonight is my last chance so now I’ve got to get up on the Bridge and spot a Polar Bear.

Mission accomplished! Harper got all of his gear in and he is now logging data.

The workday started with a 07:45 science meeting. The MST, Marine Science Technician, conducted the meeting. He briefed everyone as to weather conditions and the procedure that would be followed. After comments were made he scored the mooring as a 24, which placed it in the upper third of the green. A comment was made to the effect that the weather was not perfect because we were in the Arctic. If we were in the tropics he would allow a perfect weather score. After changing the weather point by one we were still in the upper third of the green. The sea was mirror flat. The science meeting was closed with a reminder to do this without any injuries and with no gear broken.

Harper, Matthew and John Kemp, the mooring tech, had spliced and spooled line on Sunday night so they were able to bring the gear out on the deck and get started on rigging right away.

When the Healy got to within four nautical miles of the drop point it slowed to a speed of one nautical miles per hour giving plenty of time to rig the mooring.

Harper laid out his thermistor string on the starboard (right) side of the deck while John rigged the float to a transponder (an acoustic locator beacon). This guy will send out pulses of acoustic energy to help locate the mooring if it should become lost under the ice. The thermistor (temperature measuring) string has small floats attached so it will float upwards from the large orange buoy. The two are connected with a plastic chain link that is designed to breakaway if the thermistors should somehow get frozen into the ice above.

An ADCP (acoustic Doppler current profiler) hangs below the beacon. The ADCP sends out pulses of sound and then listens for reflections off of small bugs and debris. By analyzing the reflected sound from four different hydrophones, the speed and direction of the water current can be determined. A CTD (conductivity, temperature and density) measuring instrument is also bolted to the CTD cage. This instrument package will help serve to calibrate the MMP (McLane Moored Profiler) which climbs up and down a 500 meter section of cable below the CTD. The MMP also measures current, temperature, density, and salinity but gives a continuous profile over it’s 500 meter section. The MMP is quite heavy so Harper and Matthew had their work cut out for them just to carry it out of the science lab. In fact, Harper had to change his shirt during lunch because he was soaked in sweat after the first mooring.

Another CTD was placed below the limits of the MMP and then again 500 to 1000 meters below that.
Three floats were attached to the chain that connected the acoustic releases to the anchor. The anchor consists of a large iron disk.

It was a pleasure to watch John Kemp rig the mooring. It was obvious that he was always thinking several steps ahead. While someone was tightening a bolt or line was being fed out he would jump up and get the shackles, chains and ropes he needed for the next section. During the whole operation I never saw movement on the deck stop. He had all of the moorings rigged with plenty of time left over. When he had finally rigged the anchor he would ask the MST to radio the bridge to pick of the speed by half a knot. Even while we approached the drop point he scrambled to tie down any loose gear or to prepare for the next mooring.

While approaching the drop point it was challenging to spot the 37 inch floatation buoy on the edge of the horizon because by then it was trailing a mile back. We found that the easiest way to spot it was to look for the birds circling over it. I suppose the buoy somehow looked like a small fishing boat and maybe they were hoping for a handout.

We actually passed over the drop point before John released the anchor. The drag in the line and buoy causes the anchor to fall back towards the buoy as it plummets to the bottom. Matthew mentioned that it takes almost ten minutes to fall. We were able to see the floatation buoy speed towards the boat for several minutes as the anchor fell to the bottom.
After the first mooring the other two became almost routine thanks to the perfect weather and John’s expertise.

The mooring crew had the last of the gear in by 8:30 p.m.. After more than a 12 hour day we were all ready for a break so I did a short run and then celebrated with a glass of milk and a slice of apple pie before turning in.

~John

We’re about 30 miles North of Prudhoe Bay and I haven’t seen drift ice all day long. Drift ice tends to dampen out the waves on the ocean so now the ship has a slight rocking motion that wasn’t noticeable when in the ice.Harper will be deploying his first mooring tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m. and he is very nervous. He’s been preparing for this over the past several years but I’m sure that with the attention he’s been paying to all the little details, everything will work out fine. I talked with John Kemp, the lead mooring technician, before heading up to my room. He seems relaxed and confident but he also knows tomorrow will be a long day for everyone.

One interesting deployment today was that of a bottom lander or a tripod. It was designed at Wood’s Hole to sit on the bottom and then periodically raise CTD (conductivity, temperature and density) instruments up on a line until the instrument either hits the bottom of the ice or the surface of the water. When it’s time to retrieve the data the acoustic release lets go of it’s heavy weight and the whole package floats to the surface in a single unit.

I thought I would write just a little about what it’s like to ride on an icebreaker. As I mentioned before, without the ice the ship gently rocks like any other ship. While passing through the ice the ship takes on a whole different character. The ride is much smoother side to side but when the ship will lunge along the direction of motion when we hit larger ice cakes. When grinding through the ice you can hear a rumble up and down the ship that sounds somewhat like a distant train but when down in the galley I almost want to duck as if the train is passing right over me. It really is just a few inches away when sitting against the hull and it is kind of scary to think of the frigid, cold ice water that is flowing by just on the other side of the hull. Every time I hear it, I am so grateful that I’m on the inside.

Walking around the ship gives me plenty of exercise. Every ten to twenty steps there is another airtight bulkhead door that has to be opened and immediately sealed tight. Each bulkhead door has a large lever that has to be pulled up several feet to unlock the many bolts that seal the door tight. After you step up and through the smaller oval opening you have to immediately pull the lever down to seal the door again. The closest thing that I have ever opened to one of these is a door on a bank vault. The walk between the Science lab and the galley involves opening and closing five bulkhead doors. It’s no wonder that many of the sailors have upper bodies resembling weightlifters.

The stairs on the ship are called ladders because that is just about what they are. I have to use the hand rails for fear of falling back down as I climb up. My room is on 04 deck and the science lab is on the main deck (00) which means I have to climb four flights of ladders if I want to get something from my room to take down to the science lab. I try to run or bike almost every day so I am in very good shape. However, going up and down these ladders can really poop me out. Hopefully by the end of my week on board I’ll be able to keep pace with the young sailors as they scamper up and down like squirrels.

Well it’s getting late and Harper’s gear is going down tomorrow so I better turn in.

~John

I didn’t have as much to do today because Harper and Matthew just about have everything ready to deploy. So I helped Kate clean up the O ring sealing surfaces on the hydrophones she recovered yesterday. The O rings are critical. A tiny piece of lint on a seal could allow water to slowly seep into the instrument. Electronic devices do not do well in the presence of highly conductive seawater. If the instruments fail, all the efforts of ships crew, scientists and technicians have been for nothing. We are up here circling around the Arctic Ocean to collect data. A leaking O ring means no data and a failed mission.

While I cleaned the seals, Kate installed a new hard drive and batteries in between the times she was running out on the deck to recover and deploy other hydrophones. Kate was so pleased with my work she offered to double or even triple my salary. Harper countered by offering to multiply it by ten. At this rate I’ll still be the lowest paid volunteer on the ship.

Harper will be deploying his gear on the last two days of the cruise. I took some time today to familiarize myself with Harper’s camera so I’ll be ready to take lots of pictures when it’s his time. I pretended I was a newspaper reporter and walked around the ship snapping pictures of almost everything.

Today is the first weekend the sailors have had north of the Arctic circle so it was kind of a holiday for them. The first time sailors to the Arctic are called blue noses and those that have made the trip before are know as polar bears. Today initiation of blue noses into the polar bears was begun. After a ceremony in the hanger deck, the initiates emerged with their noses painted blue and some had parts of costumes meant to tease them in a good natured way. I was told they have to keep their noses blue and take some ribbing from the existing polar bears for the next couple of days before they will be fully accepted into the polar bear fraternity which earns them the right to wear a red hat.

At the end of the day I again went down to the work out room to try running the treadmill while Harper continued to attend to the thousands of details that must be attended to. I tried several times to get the treadmill to go above 8 mph and was successful for short periods of time. It served as a good break when the treadmill would shut down. When it threw an error, I got off to unplug the machine and then wait a minute while the internal computer came back up after plugging it back in. I finally got tired of the reboot game and set the treadmill to a nice easy pace and settled into Armed Forces Network television.

After my run I checked on the Olympic results in Beijing. Downloading web pages on board can also be as challenging as running on the ships treadmills. Sometimes a page with a lot of graphics can take minutes to come up, if at all. We were told that we shouldn’t be burdening the ship’s network just for entertainment so I quickly checked on the former UAF rifle shooters and went to bed.

~John

This has been another day in the paradise of the Arctic. Before settling in for sleep I made another trip up to the bridge to try to spot a polar bear or a walrus. The sea is mirror flat calm with pans of beautiful white and blue ice. In the distance I can see a pink mist coming from the orange light of a setting sun reflecting off a light fog. Tonight, the colors and tranquility of the Arctic Ocean match any alpine scenery for splendor.

Science was happening today! Kate Stafford was busy all day with three deployments and two recoveries of her hydrophones. Being new to this business I tried to watch the recoveries and deployments of her gear. At the bottom of a mooring there is, of course, a heavy weight that holds the whole array down under the ice. At the top of the array are several orange floats and the instruments are coupled between. Attached to the bottom weight is an acoustic release that patiently waits a year for the signal to let go of the weight.

When the ship pulls up alongside the submerged mooring a small skiff is lowered into the ocean so a line can be attached to the buoy when it comes up. Tonight’s recovery went like clockwork. The buoys popped up to the surface just about 40 meters from the port (right) side of the ship. The sailors in the skiff had the line attached within minutes and in no time at all the hydrophone was on the deck.

Kate looked very tired when I stopped by the galley for a cup of herbal tea late this evening. She predicted she would have to work through the night to service her recovered hydrophones so they could be deployed again tomorrow. When I expressed my sympathy for her lack of sleep, she said it’s just this one week where its go, go, go and then she can rest later.

Kate is listening for whales. She’s got a year of eavesdropping recorded on each hard drive that comes out of each hydrophone so I imagine that she will be very busy listening to whale songs all winter long and might not get all the sleep she is wishing for.

During my day I helped to unpack the MMPs (McLane Moored Profilers). These devices crawl up and down the mooring lines measuring temperature, salinity, velocity, and pressure. Matthew went right to work updating the software in them and then programming them for the next year. He set them to make a trip between 90 and 580 meters every three hours.

When the MMPs are recovered next year they will provide data on the edge of discovery. It’s hoped the data will give insight on waves that ride on the edges of stratification. These underwater waves, called gravity waves, can take hours or days to repeat just one cycle.

After a long day in the science lab I dressed up in my running clothes to try out the treadmills in the ship’s exercise room. After I jogged at an easy pace for about twenty minutes I started dialing up the speed. When I got up to 8 mph the treadmill stopped and would not restart. I moved over to the next treadmill and that machine also stopped at 8 mph. I felt bummed that maybe I had burned out the ship’s treadmills by running too fast so I nervously walked up to the bridge to report the problem. The Master Chief on watch replied, without blinking, that they will not allow anyone to go faster than the boat. After I stared at him for few minutes in stunned disbelief, a young woman, also on duty, told me that there is a bug in the program that causes them to freeze right at 8 mph and that if I cycle through a power down/up the error would clear itself. The treadmills worked fine after the reboot.

~John

Day 1 of science operations

Bob Palomar of Scripps is on board to run the CTD* system. He is working with three WHOI joint program students to run CTD-Rosette* operations. First night aboard and they hit the ground running with the CTD. The next day was half-spent on waiting for fog to lift so that the Secret Service and VIPs could escape. Once that was accomplished, we began mooring operations, which ran until 22:00. We recovered two of Kate Stafford’s moorings and deployed at least three. These moorings are perhaps 10m long, sit in less than 100m of water, and contain whale hydrophones for recording whale calls.

All ICORTAS mooring instrumentation have been given a final field servicing (o-rings, general inspection), have been bench-tested, programmed, and are ready to deploy.

*CTD: Conductivity, Temperature & Depth sensor. We say “depth” but actually instruments measure pressure, so should properly be called CTPs. Conductivity is a proxy for salinity, and C,T&P can be used to compute density and absolute depth.

*CTD-Rosette: a large frame which holds a variety of instrumentation, typically including a CTD, and other sensors such as oxygen, flourescence (chloryphyll). Also contains bottles which can be “tripped” to take water samples at prescribed depths.

ADCP: Acoustic Dopper Current Profiler. Resolves current structure using doppler shifting of sound pulses over a distance that is determined by the the frequency of the instrument and the number of scatters in the water. We are using 75 and 300 kilohertz ADCPs and hope for a range of 400m and 100m, respectively. Hydrophone: a microphone for recording sounds underwater.

~Harper

A photo taken today at 12:00pm Alaska time from the bridge of the USGC Healy.
Location: 71 36.3N 155 37.9W
Air Temp: 38.2F

What a day! We woke up right at 6:00 to eat and then pack up to helicopter out to the Healy at 8:00 in the morning. But like most good things, we had to wait. When it was my turn I partnered up with Kate Stafford a whale biologist from the University of Washington. A Coast Guard rescue diver briefed us how to get out of a sinking helicopter and then we got suited up in our survival suits and flight helmets. My adrenalin was pumping as I anticipated my ride. Finally the helicopter landed and I got to wait. It was not the bird assigned to us. There were two helicopters shuttling two people at a time so Harper and his flying partner were quickly suited up and shuttled out to the aircraft leaving us standing in the hanger. It wasn’t such a bad wait really because we got to hear several genuine rescue stories. Each ultimately had the moral, “Wear your life jacket”. When our assigned copter finally came we were strapped in with a five point safety harness, one strap between the legs, two around the outside and two over the shoulders and then we waited and listened to the banter of the aircrew and the whine of the turbine. When we finally lifted off and headed out to sea I realized why we had to wait for what seemed so long. The Healy was so close to shore that the ride took less than five minutes but it took longer than that to strap down and off load the bird ahead of us. Fortunately for me, the flight deck took a few extra minutes to get ready for us after the flight deck was empty so we got to circle the Healy three times before setting down just before the fog rolled in and stopped flight operations. I was lead out of the aircraft to the assigned sailor in a yellow suit that lead us off the flight deck to the hanger where we stripped off the helmets, gloves, and flight suits. I was rather clumsy and almost fell over because I was trying to look around at all the new sights while balancing on one foot to strip the suit off.

With our suits off we were lead through a maze of narrow hallways and watertight locking doors to the science conference room. We were given short briefing, issued a pager and room and then told we just had fifteen minutes left for lunch. It was a relief to make our way to the galley and find the familiar faces of Harper and the other science crew smiling over fried chicken.

There was also a louder hum of excitement on the ship than you would expect because the Admiral of the Coast Guard and the Director of Homeland Security were scheduled to fly out later in the afternoon to inspect the ship and address the sailors.

After lunch I carried my bag to my assigned room, 404, and then wandered the ship for a while to get oriented. Eventually I felt I should get to work on the equipment but I didn’t know where to go. While I was trying to find the science lab, all the new hands on ship were called to report to the conference room. At least I knew where that was so I reported and waited for Harper to guide me through the maze of the ship to the science work at hand.

Harper and Holly Dail, a graduate student from Woods Hole, had started to carry crates of gear from deep in the hold to the elevator. I felt a little sheepish because I had been lost in the ship while they had been sweating over heavy crates so I pitched in and tried to make myself useful.

After unpacking the gear we needed, Matthew Alford from the University of Washington took me under his wing and showed me the details of preparing the CTD probes for deployment. The CTD probes measure conductivity, temperature and depth every few minutes and store the data over the year. While I worked on the CTDs, Holly prepped the ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiling) probes and Matthew set up the programming for all them all. Harper stayed busy answering technical questions and laying out the work to come for us.

Except for supper and attending the ship’s briefing by the Admiral, most of the rest of my day was spent in the Science Lab examining O rings and installing battery packs. By the time I was finished I felt like a real technician.

After I tied down the probes so they wouldn’t roll to the floor if the sea became rough, I headed to my room to shower and get ready for bed. On my way up to my cabin I was treated to a beautiful orange midnight sunset, dark blue sea water and translucent blue sea ice for a seascape.

After my shower I still couldn’t settle in enough to sleep after all the new things I had seen and done so I made a long circuitous walk around the ship down to the galley for a sedative in the form of a piece of pie and a glass of milk.

~John