Hayley Hung writes: To everyone's surprise, it was and still is extremely stormy today. The weather forecast said 25 C and sunny!! It was in fact raining with ice pellets, cloudy and 30 knots of wind gusting to 40+ knots. The ship was rocking back and forth like a leaf! Many people felt dizzy. All the rosette work was cancelled. When lowering a mooring, one of the shackles broke, losing part of the mooring to the bottom of the ocean. Luckily, this part was replaceable. There is a strong low pressure over the Beaufort Sea area as INCATPA team member, meteorologist Jianmin Ma, indicated in his comments on the blog earlier. We may need to move further back into the gulf b...

Hayley Hung writes: The ship was close to Tuktoyaktuk today. Many scientists took the barge and helicopter to the river delta to collect samples. Very quiet day for me to concentrate on the Arctic air concentration data of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) that I did not manage to work on back in the office. Gary, the captain and Tony went to Inuvik to find Tony’s luggage which was lost on his way up to the Amundsen. Poor Tony has been borrowing clothes from people for the whole last week. Tony was so happy when he showed up at the bar tonight in his new found wardrobe! ...

Hayley Hung writes: Since the rosette has not been functioning properly for several days now, most people have been working in the laboratories on samples previously collected and preparing for upcoming sampling. During this time, several moorings were deployed and a few net tows were collected. My air sampling has been working very well though. I had an interview with Anthony (Tony) Christopher and Patrick Ellison (Anthony Christopher Productions) who are filmmakers producing a documentary on the Amundsen. Despite the lovely sun, it was extremely windy and cold on the front deck where we did the interview. We were literally yelling at each other. The topic was mainly on contaminants transport to the Arctic and how climate change may affect such movement. ...

Hayley Hung writes: A very quiet day, most people stayed up through the night. When we got up, the rosette was once again not working. The conductivity-depth-temperature (CTD) acquisition system and pH sensors were not functioning and the pump turned off after reaching a certain depth. Scientists relying on the water samples were very frustrated. The ship cannot move further west out of the gulf as planned since the forecast showed 25 knots of wind west of Banks Island. We continued to retrieve moorings deployed in the last 2 years. New moorings were deployed for continued measurements. We had a big party and the theme was Camper's Christmas. I did not know what this was all about until Veronique explained that it is a Quebec tradition for RV campers to have Christma...

Hayley Hung writes: I took an air sample today and started working on some calculations for an article and the Dioxin meeting in Birmingham one week after I disembark. The rosette has been broken for the last two days. Veronique Lago, my roommate, is the rosette operator. She has been very busy trying to get it restarted. In fact, she has not been sleeping for more than 2 hours at any one time for the last 24 hours!! Amanda’s water samples were supposed to be taken at 10 pm. Due to the delays in repairing the rosette, we stayed up till 4:30 am to finish the sampling. The sun was finally here in the evening!! After so many gloomy days! Backed by an amazing hue of pink and golden twilight, it moved halfway down towards the horizon and came back up at around 2:30 am -...

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...