6.3.2007. Day 6. Tuesday
Today we continued the work that had been interrupted by the polar bears. This was the best day for sampling so far. Excellent weather (calm & warm) and no problems with equipment. There were a lot of ringed seals resting on the ice all over the fjord. We used one of their holes as a place for zooplankton sampling. That’s why the station has the name Seal-hole. We got zooplankton samples with WP 2 and WP 11 (a new name for the small mesh-sized WP2). The samples we preserved in formalin for further examination by some people sitting somewhere in a dark basement in the city of Tromsø. We also pulled the sediment traps up. For some reason, the traps had collected some wool in them. I still strongly suspect that there are sheep sedimenting in the sea…
Zooplankton sampling on the sea ice.
Amphipod sampling on the sea ice.
There’s something about the climate here. Wise guys say that all Svalbard is actually desert, because of low precipitation and long snow season. That’s not true, I think. The warm West Spitsbergen Current flows on the west coast of Svalbard and makes the climate actually quite warm and relatively moist (compared to the Arctic on average). However, Northern and Eastern Svalbard is a desert.
The amount of snow (=precipitation) is much lower in Rijpfjorden than in Longyearbyen. Vegetation is very sparse, almost none. All you can see are rocks, ice, some snow, seals, foxes, polar bears, ptarmigans and reindeer on this frozen desert. Reindeer?! Being a plant-eating herbivore on desert does not sound like a really ingenious strategy, but still they seem to survive! That’s amazing! They make a mission, which appears to be completely impossible, come true. Lots of respect to Svalbard reindeer. It’s hard to be a large herbivore on the frozen desert of the high Arctic.
The picture is not from Rijpfjorden
7.3.2007. Day 7. Wednesday
Weather: cloudy, foggy now and then, weak wind, ~-10 C. After breakfast Jørgen, Stig and John started preparing a zooplankton-sampling trip to Seal-hole. While they were away Henrik and I stayed in the camp preparing filtration equipment and amphipod traps and sorting some amphipods from yesterday’s sampling. While having lunch the zooplankton group returned from their sampling.
After lunch, we fought with the filtration equipment. Trying to fit parts together (which were not meant to be together) took some effort, but after some hours of cursing in Finnish and wondering, we managed to make the cap for the bottle tight enough to stop water flow to the pump. It was filtering time! For some reason the filters contained some wool after filtering…
Another lab activity was to sort out Calanus glacialis calanoid stages for lipid analyses. Sounds pretty easy, but after sitting for a few hours in the cold lab tent, picking up zooplankton from ice slush on a slightly tilting table, I have to admit that the task started to be slightly challenging even for us. After many painful hours and some Finnish curses (again…), we did the job. Now we are waiting for co-authorization from the people sitting somewhere in the high buildings in the city of Tromsø…
Around 2000, five deep-frozen expedition members crawled into the cabin for dinner and planning for tomorrow.
8.3.2007 Day 8. Thursday
During the morning Jørgen and Stig continued Calanus sorting, while John fixed the camp. Henrik and I were on the ice deploying amphipod traps in the Loven transect (again…). Lunch was enjoyed at 1330. Menu was Drytech™ mix with polarbrød…no changes in the diet.
Something about our main study object – amphipods. Amphipods are scavenging 1mm – 5cm long crustaceans, and are an important part of arctic food webs.
Amphipods. Five specimens of Anonyx nugax on the left and four specimens of Gammarus setosus on the right.
Amphipods normally live as benthic animals, or hang off the bottom of sea ice. An old sea ice community is like a young benthic community, except everything hangs upside down. Since we are in the arctic and sea ice is quite important, ice amphipods are part of our interest.
A.nugax and Bluffwarden. This must be art!
Weather during the day was excellent: ~15 degrees below, some wind, but clear sky and sun. After lunch, our water-sampling trip was delayed a bit because of a polar bear, which was scratching his back on a pole we put as a mark for the hole we should have gone to. After the polar bear went away for seal hunting, we had a chance to go for sampling. While the bear desperately tried to hunt ringed seals, which lay on the ice and escaped to their holes when the bear came close, we fought with the Polish water pump. Maybe it works in Poland, but not in Rijpfjorden. It was always frozen. After one and half hours of working our result was 28 liters of water and mental break-down. We decided to start sampling phytoplankton. That was even more unsuccessful. The net was exactly the same size as the drill hole. So we decided to go home. During the 1 km trip the sampled water had frozen (or had some slush) making filtering impossible. So we decided to have dinner and go to sleep.
Sampling on Svalbard can be sometimes quite interesting, because of polar bears, which just want to play with almost everything.
However, despite our nearly failed evening of sampling, the polar bear was nice to see. It was a big male. Old and wise enough not to come to examine our camp. The king of the frozen desert – and it knew it. There is no way to doubt that. The fact was easy to sense from every movement of the bear. A top-predator doesn’t have any reason to fear anyone except human. This guy had met people before and thus it didn’t want to make acquaintance a second time. It had learnt the lesson.
Towards evening the weather got better. In fact, it was the best we have had so far. A great day.
9.3.2007 Day 9. Friday
In the morning Henrik and I went out to take in the amphipod traps and to deploy them again on a new transect. While we were sampling, Stig and Jørgen went to take light measurements and phytoplankton samples, and to create some new work for John. One of the ice drills broke down for some reason and was sent to Sir John’s Hospital, where John tried to heal it with his Samish magic (also known as engineering skills). The result was quite easy to guess – the drill was working before lunch.
One example of the importance of the quality of bait in a trap. In the left hand sample, we used unfrozen chicken while on right hand side the bait was a bit frozen. The difference is something that I would call significant…
After lunch we started with lab work. We sorted amphipods for lipid analyses and stable isotopes and fixed the rest in alcohol. Stig and I made an effort to filter water samples. The amphipod trap turned out to contain eight species, which was a bit more than we expected. During the evening, once we finished in the lab, we thought that the day was over, but someone didn’t agree…
While we were preparing always-so-delicious Drytech™ dinner in Bjørnehiet, John found quite unpleasant visitor stalking in the darkness middle of our camp. A young polar bear was trying to find some dinner. After alarming the cabin folks, we started quite hectic try to scare the bear away from our camp. The action some how reminds me a conflict Johansen and Nansen are reported to have had with a polar bear just about one hundred and ten years ago.
We, for example, learnt that at least this particular polar bear had green shiny eyes, similar to an arctic fox’s, when pointed in headlight towards face. After some persuasion, we got the gatecrasher to forgo his plans to have a Friday gathering in our cabin and it fled back to its kingdom - the sea ice.
Polar bears are quite harmless, when you spot them early enough, but when you find a polar bear in the middle of your camp or encounter it in bad visibility, the situation is always more or less dangerous either for you or for the polar bear. Usually for both. When meeting polar bears, your own safety comes first. Right after that comes the safety of the bear. You do everything to try to secure your own safety without injuring the bear. Sometimes these two objectives are in conflict – the bear is shot. However, in spite of the polar bear sometimes being a little bit of a dangerous animal, the polar bear is also a great example of an animal that has adapted to the cold and icy environment astonishingly well in a relatively short time. Polar bears should be respected because of that fact, not because of it’s so media sexy to be dangerous for always so egoistic human being.
In the beginning of the expedition, we were almost paranoid about polar bear danger, but when nothing happens for a long time, you get a strange safe feeling and you start to make mistakes. This time one mistake was enough, because most of time we were really alert. The case proved that Murphy’s Law is also valid in the middle of nowhere. This time we were lucky and the bear fled quite soon after we had spotted it. No one (either the bear or us) got hurt. However, we learnt the lesson: always be alert – the bears are out there, even though you may not see any for many days.
Text and photos: Mikko Vihtakari