We are heading into the ice pack in the South-Eastern Beaufort, into a part of the pack that my assistant Alice Orlich has affectionately named ‘The Monkey Tail’. Alice got to join an ice reconnaissance helicopter flight today. It is pretty interesting ice, with small floes of thick (>1.5m) multi-year and thin (~50cm) first year ice. The floes are very uniform in size. From the 2000m altitude you can almost imagine one is looking at a giant unmade jigsaw puzzle. It is really obvious that one could imagine modelling the sea ice around us right now as a granular material. It looks quite different from the central ice pack. Winter has begun, 10cm ice formed over night between the older ice floes, and a sprinkling of snow earlier this morning.
~Jenny Hutchings
