TIMELAPSE ICE TRANSIT
Every single one of our instruments remains attached to the boat by a cable while it’s in the water, even if we sample down to 6,000 ft (which we might do near the end of the trip- so far most sites have been more like 1,200 ft deep). We cannot let ice pieces come in contact with our cables because the ice is so heavy and the cables have so much tension on them they could break. Not only would we lose a very expensive piece of equipment we can’t replace on this expedition, but a cable with that much tension on it could snap back and seriously hurt people.
The way the captain and pilots deal with the challenge of ice is an absolute art. They read the landscape in a way that is unavailable to me. We’ve been in heavier ice over the last few days, which means we look to do our science in open areas of water like little runways. If pieces of ice drift close to a wire within the runway, the pilots can fire the positioning thrusters to push the ice back behind us. Sometimes they’ll face the ship a different way than normal to block ice from drifting back toward the wire in the first place, or they’ll position the ship using ice to shelter the scientists working on the back deck. All while making sure we don’t get trapped by the large-scale movements of huge fields of ice we watch through daily satellite updates.
🚢 Virginia
This was yesterday’s transit from one science runway to another. Things to watch for:
- 0:02 we curve left around a round sea ice piece with a thicker thing behind it that we really don’t want to run into.
- 0:39 we pass a piece of open-ish water, but it’s not big enough to be a runway for us.
- 0:43 just off the starboard (right) side, we open up a big crack in the ice.
- 1:10 there’s a small lump of ice in front of us and just to port (left). We avoid that clump because it’s really hard ice- probably the last bit of a glacier that’s been gradually melting for years. That land ice is so hard that it’s a much bigger deal to hit than a bigger chunk of sea ice.
- 1:12 we bump into a bigger chunk of sea ice because we avoided the land ice. It nudges us back a little.
- 1:31 you can see the runway we’re aiming for in the distance, at the top of the screen. Even though we have satellite maps of sea ice, at the (time and space) scale that we use to find science runways, most of the time it’s the pilots on the bridge with binoculars finding us a good sampling spot.
- 1:39 we hit our runway and turn left so we can start mapping the seafloor in detail.