Eight brilliant Inuit youths from Canada, Alaska, Greenland, and Russia joined the School-on-Board (SOB) program and participate in all science activities on the Amundsen. Robin Gislason (SOB, Winnipeg, Manitoba) and Scot Nickels (Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK), Ottawa, Ontario) lead the group. They are joined by Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra composer, Vincent Ho, who is going to compose a piece of symphony based on activities and people observed on board. One interesting question posed to him today was how he thinks climate change will influence the future development in music. He said it will change the perceptions of musicians on the Arctic from being simply beautiful and scenic to recognising the underlying dramatic change. I had the pleasure of giving a presentation to the group on a...

Everyone was starting to get familiar with life on board; a few have already been on the ship for several weeks. There were also returning scientists and newbies like myself. The day went by quickly with people getting ready for experiments, clearing out laboratory areas and sorting through equipment. I am planning to take daily air samples for the analysis of organic pollutants as part of the IPY INCATPA program while taking similar air samples to test for perfluorinated compounds (Scotch-guard-related chemicals) for my colleague Mahiba Shoeib (Environment Canada). I will also be checking the mercury vapour analyzer which measures gaseous elemental mercury in air and equipment for the IPY OAS...

July 17 3:30 am (Central time) Winnipeg: Under starry sky, four very sleepy scientists were waiting for the arrival of the charter flight carrying about 60 Coastguard crew and scientists from Quebec. Amundsen Chief Scientist for leg 10a, Gary Stern; graduate students, Lauren Candlish and Amanda Chaulk; and I (Research Scientist of Environment Canada, Hayley Hung) were half-asleep when we boarded the plane at around 5:30. We were making our way to Yellowknife where we would split into 2 Convair flights to Kugluktuk. It was a very long journey even if the charter planes did not stall twice and delay for 5 hours in total. At Kugluktuk, we were transported to the ship on a helicopter. To move 60+ people onto and off the ship in a helicopter was a very slow process. We finally all made it...

In a period of 48 hours, our weather has changed three times, from (almost) Miami Beach-type temperatures, to driving snow, and back to sun late this afternoon. Lingering morning snow prevented a survey of the region by helicopter. Instead, time on the ground gave the scientists an opportunity to finish building their instrument towers. We also have started to pack camp, stacking trash bags and tools about 200 feet from our tent in preparation for our scheduled helicopter ride off the ice tomorrow morning. There is still no word about Sarah Das’s dye, which she poured in a moulin several days ago to track drained lake water flowing from the base of the ice sheet to the coast. Our source on the coast south of Ilulissat (Sarah’s graduate student, Maya Bhatia) said recent s...

Dr. Manish Tiwari, scientist at the National Centre For Antarctic & Ocean Research in Goa, India, writes: India is enthusiastically pursuing the outreach goal of IPY, which is being coordinated by National Centre for Antarctic & Ocean Research (NCAOR, under the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Govt. of India) in collaboration with WWF-India (World Wide Fund for Nature). Several competitions were conducted for the school children throughout India that included poster & model making, projects, stamp designing etc. as outlined in the chart below. The award winning posters of the first competition i.e.,...

A 150-meter ice core pulled from the McCall Glacier in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge this summer may offer researchers their first quantitative look at up to two centuries of climate change in the region. The core, which is longer than 1 1/2 football fields, is the longest extracted from an arctic glacier in the United States, according to Matt Nolan, an associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Northern Engineering who has led research at McCall Glacier for the past six years. The sample spans the entire depth of the glacier and may cover 200 years of history, he said. “What we hope is that the climate record will extend back into the Little Ice Age,” said Nolan. “Up until the late 1800s these glaciers were actually gr...

Given that the weather was not improving and that Nick and Jessica had the Kaktovik scene figured out, we decided to head back to civilization a bit earlier. We had begun settling into Kaktovik life pretty well and enjoyed our visits with the neighbors and the chaos of Waldos, but the list of things to do to prepare for the next phase of the trip began growing longer and longer the more we thought about it, and the list of productive things to do in Kaktovik was getting pretty short. So once Turner got his stitches out, we switched our reservations and headed back to town. Huge snowfences surround the infrastructure of Kaktovi...

Benny arrived from LA a few days ago and today we went on our first photo flight. Benny is a professional photographer and specializes in aerial photography. He brought with him several high-powered cameras and helped me figure out how to use the one I bought from him on ebay. My camera uses 5 inch wide negative film to take 4”x5” photos, compared to 35mm film which is less than 1” squared. One of Benny’s cameras takes 8”x10” photos. He built this camera himself, machining it out of a solid block of aluminum to be lightweight and aerodynamic. Another camera has 39 megapixel resolution, compared to my high-end Nikon which has only 12 megapixels, and it also has 12 stop dynamic range, which greatly exceeds a digital Nikon at about 6 and even black and white film at 10. So we look...

After 50 years of attempts, a high resolution map of McCall Glacier may have just been acquired. During the International Geophysical Year 1957-58, eight glaciers in Alaska were selected for long-term research. A primary component of this research was the use of topographic maps – by making such maps periodically, the evolution of the shape of the glacier could be tracked and its dynamics better understood. McCall Glacier was the centerpiece of this research and the only glacier of the eight where a major field program was established. As such, the first tests in making topographic maps were done there as that is where it would be most useful to the field team. Unfortunately, circumstances prevented the mapping team’s return to McCall Glacier, and all that we were left with is a map ma...

I was up at 4:30AM to check weather, which was nearly perfect, and I checked in with Jessica and Nick to let them know that today could be our day. We only need about 3 days of this weather to complete the project, and in one day we could gather our most essential data. They arrived from Deadhorse about 7AM and we quickly redeployed the ground-based GPS. I sat in the truck as they taxied off, waiting around to get a picture of them taking off with the background of mountains. But they never took off. I called them on the radio and they said they were having issues with the lidar. So they came back to the ramp and we fooled around with things a bit more. I unplugged their antenna going to the top of the plane and plugged it back in, and about this time the unit came alive again. So they tax...