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First mooring and firedrills...
We have two fire drills today, one in the morning around 10:30 and one at around 13:45. The first one was a practice; the second one was the real drill for the ship inspection. The crew built a scenario that one of the scientists became unconscious in the aft laboratory during the second fire drill. Everyone was nervous when one of us was missing. Fortunately, the drill went on smoothly and the inspector gave the ship a pass. However, due to the drill everyone was scrambling to make sure that all the solvent inventories were up to date and thanks to solvent coordinator, Amanda Chaulk, everything was up to specs. Not to speak that all research work has to be reorganised so that nobody was running a sample during the drill. I managed to f...
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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...
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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...
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Predators do shape the arctic fauna. This year, the den next door is the only den with young. We have counted 8 puppies but saw the smallest one dead within a few days.
Two wildlife photographers have been visiting us and taken pictures like these. More about the marking of the puppies on www.arcticstation.nl.
photo's by Jasper Doest (www.doest-photograp...
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Packing seems to have become a major component of our lifestyle. Our house is mostly one big room which seems to spend most of its time full with piles of gear in some stage of being packed or unpacked. Right now we’re packing for three trips – we leave for Colorado tonight for a week, we leave for a backpacking trip into the glacier a few days after we return, and we have 5 weeks on the glacier after that. The glacier portion is the most work to prepare for, as we’re packing this with the plan of dropping it down to the glacier from the plane, in case the plane is unable to land on the ice. So everything has to be packaged to survive a drop of 100 feet and a crash landing at 50 mph. I have no prior experience at air drops, so this is sure to be a learning experience. Fortunately its...
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...
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Thursday, 17 July 2008 19:12
Nolan on McCall Glacier: Hard science, caribou stampedes and mosquito squadrons
Written by Stefan Geens
University of Alaska Fairbanks glaciologist Matt Nolan has just completed the second phase of an extensive study of McCall Glacier in northern Alaska, briefly returning to civilization after over two months on the glacier with heaps of ice cores and measurements of glacier dynamics, but also with some great panoramic photos, timelapse photography, and videos of his young son Turner skiing for the first time.
Matt’s daily documenting of what scientists (and his family) get up to on an glacier expedition has now been posted to IPY.org, with many new panoramas and video. You can read all of Matt’s entries, in reverse chronological order, but below are just some of the highlights:
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Wednesday, 16 July 2008 22:06
Day 84-86: Press releases gives McCall Glacier another 15 minutes of fame
Written by Matt Nolan
The past few days for me have been consumed by a press release that UAF sent out describing our ice coring success. I had written a draft of the release several weeks earlier and sent it out to our UAF public information office on our arrival in Kaktovik, but it took some time to work through the system and go through a few iterations. Here is a link to the initial release.
Much of the time related to this got soaked up getting photos ready. I had prepared a bunch the week before, but then I was told we needed model release forms from everyone in the photos. Of course nearly all my photos have people in them, and most of these people are hard to get hold off in summer. So then I had to sort through to find...
Flying over the Greenland Ice Sheet several days ago, scientist Mark Behn was surprised to see South Lake still full of sapphire-blue water. The 2- to 3-kilometer-wide lake forms each spring and summer, fed by melting ice. The water eventually builds up so much weight that it cracks the ice at the bottom of the lake, and the water drains away through the ice. That should have already happened by now.
Mark was thrilled to see the still-brimming lake. Rarely have scientists had an opportunity to witness a draining lake, which is why they put many instruments around the lakes to capture the action while they are not there. Mark and his colleagues had just gotten word that another lake they were scheduled to visit, North Lake, had just drained. “We just missed it,” he said....
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