Cruising in Ice


In the end of April the AT-211 class headed towards Björnöya for some field (or floe) work. A couple days before heading off, we'd been on an evening trip to Barentsburg with some great weather to see the local architecture and structure styles. Barentsburg is a very colorful Russian mining town, quite different from Longyearbyen at least judging by the building style.  

For our AT-211 trip, we set sail on the 24th of April on the ship Polarsyssel, not an ice breaker, and all prepared for a couple of days of hanging out indoors without internet. Views were great! A lot of water, a lot of birds, and eventually a lot of ice. We encountered fields of pancake ice floes in no time, and started looking for the ideal piece of salty frozen water - it had to be thick and big enough for security and enough working space. After we had found one and at a leisurly pace moored to the floe, we started working and did all the exciting stuff like measure the temperature profile along the thickness of the floe, performe compression tests, take CTD-casts off the side and moore some ADCP profilers off the side as well. We worked for a couple of days (in between work we enjoyed the cinema and views from the bridge), and then headed onwards after deploying a tracker that was attached to the floe. A lot of seals and a few walruses were seen, some students even spotted a couple of Humpback whale fins in the distance, but because we were not very close to land birds and a few marine mammals were the only wild life observations that were made on the cruise.

Our next goal was to find another piece of ice! We found an ideal floe with some interesting features and performed the same procedures as for the first one. Some drama went down as our anchors on the ice kept pinging off, and eventually we had to call it a day and leave the floe to it. We deployed an another ice drift tracker and headed off, now apparently looking for an ice berg (see photos below). We were close to Björnöya but did not actually get to see it...

Polarsyssel got back to Longyearbyen on the 30th of April, and all of us headed home pretty happy.

After that we've all had to (at least the technology students, don't know about biology ;)) get down to work for the deadline season and we also had the Arctic PRIZE crew in town for a couple of days after their journey from Tromsö to Longyearbyen on Helmer Hansen. Weather's been a little all over the place and Snow is disappearing quite fast (when it is not snowing), but we've had some very pretty days with blue skies! 




We found an iceberg (spot the big blue thing in the middle).




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