Lance, the research vessel of the Norwegian Polar institute, is laying in the harbour. I am standing on the deck and watch it from the front to the back, from the bridge in the top down to the cargo room. On this space 29 persons are going to live for to weeks.
It is calm and sunny. If it wasn’t because of the cold you could take it for a nice summer day on the mainland. The sun makes the water and snow sparkle and the waves in the harbour give a relaxing sound of summer vacation.
Maybe it is getting summer, but not the kind of summer I am used to. We are going north, and if this is summer it’s a summer with ice. The plan was to go to Rijpfjorden at Nordaustlandet but it is closed by ice so we will try to find a fjord further south, or go directly into the ice west of Spitsbergen. But first we go deeper into Isfjorden to make CTD measurements of water there. Only a few hours after the ship left Longyearbyen it enters the first fjord ice. It is thin and breaks up in big pieces when the boat forces through it. The open water between the floes freezes while we are watching it. The new, transparent ice that looks as dark as the water is called nilas.
Far away are the windblown, snow covered plateau mountains of Isfjorden. Exposed ridges of rock, paint a dark grey pattern in the otherwise white snow covered mountains, and the haze is standing completely still as if it had been frozen when it was crawling over the tops and through the valley. In the bottom of the fjord I spot the light, mediterranean blue colour of glacier ice. It is heavily cracked and I try to imagine the fjord full of calved ice bergs in the summer.
17 April
I am on shift from 02-04 in the morning. It is probably the worst shift but I don’t mind. The work is interesting and weather is good. There is some cloud stripes across the sky but no wind or precipitation. When we pull the instrument out of the sea it is dripping of water that shines in the mild light. But weather is changing fast. In a few minutes it thickens up and starts blowing. Big snow flakes dance elegant around us before they settle down on our working suits or on the deck. At the horizon a pink light is breaking through blurry clouds of fog. The sun? My hands get wet when I fill bottles of water samples. Every time the ship stops one person has to run down to the cargo room and start the Doppler current meter, and before it starts again someone has to go down and stop the meter. If it’s on when the ship is moving we will get noise in the data.
07:25
A bunch of kids are playing outside my window. I don’t understand why I didn’t pull down the curtains before I went to bed. When they see that I am awake they rush to the windows and start to bank on them and pull the locked handles. This has repeated it self several nights now. I don’t want to be mean to children so I always behaved nice to them. Now it is enough. I point finger and shake my fist, screaming that they shall get away. Suddenly an alarm clock rings beside me. I realize that I am asleep and it is time to get up for breakfast. Although I am just one or two minutes too late everybody is already in the mess room when I come. There is hot porridge and sandwiches.
We are done with the measurements in Isfjorden. Now Lance heads north towards Nordaustlandet. During the morning the ship starts to roll. I am getting seasick. I try to eat, even though I feel ill. It should make me less seasick, I have heard. Otherwise the only thing I can do is to lie down. I take motion sickness pills but they make me so tired that I fall a sleep all the time.
By the evening the sea calms down and the effect of the pills ceases. I go up on the deck for the first time this day. The view is as painfully beautiful. The mild colours of the Arctic, pale blue, dark marine and frosty snow are every where. To the left the sea is spreading out all the way to the horizon and to the right we pass some mountains. Far, far away on the left I can see ice.
18 April
Ice floes are scratching the boat and making a terrible noise. It is shaking but the waves are dampened so I don’t get seasick anymore. The ice is so compact that we move very slowly. I spend the day trying to get an instrument work and reading cruise reports from earlier years. After dinner the ship stops. We are stuck in the ice. No one is especially worried. We are already in a place where we can do our measurements so we stay.
We had hardly reached to put the equipment on the ice when a polar bear turned up. The yellowish big animal is walking towards the ship, swinging its head and nosing around. Probably it is curious about the big, strange thing that stopped here. It comes closer and finally it has to be scared away with a flare gun. We take up the work again and it is my turn to be bear watch. It is pleasant job in this mild weather when the evening sun gives the ice a dim shining and I stand with binoculars in the place on the boat that has the best view.
21 April
Everything runs surprisingly smooth. Every now and then the work is interrupted by polar bears and the small CTD that I am responsible for behave quite moody, but we get the data we need and I have started working with the recordings from one of the weather stations as well.
Weather has been good all the time. It is mild, around 10 degrees Celsius below zero, and no wind. Sometimes there comes snow showers and at a point the sight was so bad that we had to stop working because the bear watch couldn’t see anything. But most of the time it has been sunny.
It strikes me how big contrasts my life has to friends and family back in Sweden. At my parents place it is 15 degrees warm and there is already flowers in the garden. Two friends of mine are going to marry this summer. They have their own apartment with furniture and four cats.
I love flowers and herbs and when I was a kid I wanted to become a gardener or artist.
I think I am as far away as possible from that. On a boat stuck in the ice at 79 degrees north. I still live in a student dorm, not owning more than I can easily send by mail wherever I am going next. And I like it.
I am in the middle of my favourite element – ice. When I have the bear watch I can watch light blue ice bergs frozen into the sea, far away glaciers and mountains. When I am working with the instruments or analyze data it is also related to ice and I am doing what I most of all want to do – polar research.
It is hard to imagine how much work lies behind the data we collect. First, a ship, strong enough to sail through ice, with crew and loads of instruments and equipment has to get to the area of interest. Then all the heavy instruments have to be carried to their places, set up and connected to power supply. A lot of holes have to be drilled in the ice and someone has to watch for bears all the time. Layers of warm clothes has to get on and off every time you go in and out, and often you work in shifts so you have to get up in the middle of the night to do measurements. And if weather or ice conditions get bad all this effort might be for nothing. But you never give up. You use what you have of data and go on. Make another try, another time or another place.