Hayley Hung writes: Amanda and I again got up at around 4:30 to wait for the rosette for our second round of water sampling for mercury. Another sleepless night for many scientists. SOB disembarked with CFL photographer, Doug Barber, and composer, Vincent Ho, at Sachs Harbour. Chief Scientist, Gary Stern, and 3 scientists, Sylvia Gremes Cordero, Cristina Romera, and I were honoured to be invited to a community feast at Sachs Harbour. For the first time in our lives, we tried a dried muscox and fish salad which was delicious. The feast also include amazing cranberry scones, muscox stew, braised Arctic char, fillet of trout, stew of geese and geese eggs, ham, turkey and salad. We took takeout for the scientists that did not manage to go to the feast. Sachs Harbour is a ...

Five Elders from Sachs Harbour came on board with 2 journalists for a tour of the icebreaker and the SOB students gave presentations on their perspectives of this week’s experience. The Chief Scientist and the Captain also presented about their work on the ship. The day ended with a workshop on merging traditional knowledge and western science on the topic of climate change. We discussed about how science was previously done in the North with scientists not communicating their work and resulted in adversities in communities towards scientific research. CFL and other programs such as NCP have been very successful in communicating research results to local comm...

Due to the delay in retrieving the mooring, all work for the full station has been delayed. Most of the scientific crew has been working through the night. I got up at 5 am to help Amanda Chaulk to collect water samples from the rosette to analyse for mercury at different depths. Unfortunately, we do not have a chance to send out a zodiac to collect surface water before we move on; the profile is therefore incomplete. We aimed at collecting another profile in the next few days. We have a rendezvous with the Louis St. Laurent Icebreaker today and we had a stock-up. All the scientists helped out to move 20kgs of potatoes, flour, onions, milk etc. for 2 hours. Everyone’s arms and back were sore. ...

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...

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...