One of Amundsen's labs
The entire day was spent sampling one site right in the middle of the Amundsen Gulf. The ship arrived about 2 a.m. and the work started promptly. This site is called a "full station," which means that pretty much every team on board is taking as complete a set of samples as possible.
The idea is that in certain key locations — these "full stations" — you can get a snapshot of the life and ocean conditions. By comparing those snapshots year by year, trends may become apparent in such things as the amount of carbon in the water — which reflects how much biological activity is going on, the kinds of chemical contaminants that are present and what kinds of microbes and plankton are floating around, providing food for other things up the food chain.
The Rosette was going up and down from deep ocean to deck, collecting water that the teams will filter and examine.
As a result, the Rosette — the main water sampling device — was going up and down from deep ocean to deck, over and over, collecting water that the teams will filter and examine, looking for the things they’re interested in. Not all the work is done aboard ship, though.
The Zodiac — a smaller inflatable launch — was sent out in the middle of the afternoon to sit just a few hundred metres away for some particularly sensitive surface water turbulence measurements that the vast bulk of the ship would interfere with.
The high point of the day was the recovery of one of the sub-surface moorings that the Amundsen has scattered across Arctic waters from Hudson's Bay to the Beaufort Sea. These are stationary packages of instruments that are suspended in the water column, usually in several hundred metres' depth. A massive truck tire, filled with concrete, is attached to hundreds of metres of Kevlar line.
Every few dozen metres, an instrument is spliced into the line. Some instruments measure currents, water salinity and temperature. Other instruments are water samplers, which are set to grab just a few hundred millilitres of water every week or month. There are sediment traps that catch debris falling through the water column at different depths.
Also attached along the line are buoys to keep the instruments floating at the appropriate depth. These moorings are dropped in the water and left for up to two years before being retrieved in the kind of operation I saw today.
Today’s retrieval went almost perfectly. For one thing, the weather was brilliant. It was a clear day, with just a few clouds. The light was excellent, though the sun was so low in the Arctic sky that I couldn't shake the feeling that it was morning all day.
The ship can find the rough area in which the mooring was dropped with careful navigation. The moorings send a sonar signal to the ship, which is audible when we're relatively close, to fine-tune their position. Then a signal is sent from the ship to the mooring, which causes it to break loose from its truck-tire anchor and the whole works pops to the surface, ready to be hauled in.
As I mentioned, everything was almost perfect today, except that somehow some of the buoys at the top of the mooring were missing. Instead of five large floating buoys, there were only two.
This was extremely good luck, in a way. These moorings are designed to have instruments all the way down to the sea floor, but the instruments nearest the surface are likely the ones that are going to have the most important data. Put them too near the surface, however, and it's entirely possible that they can be caught in the sea ice that will start forming around here in about November.
When that happens, the entire mooring, with all its instruments attached, can be dragged away, never to be seen again. The instruments on a mooring can be worth several hundred thousand dollars, and more importantly, the data gathered by them can be essential to the projects and careers of researchers here aboard ship and in labs around the world (most of the sediment traps on this mooring, for example, were destined for researchers in Japan).
As a result, the top-most parts of the moorings — those most likely to be caught up in sea ice — are designed to break away if they get captured. That's likely what happened to the top-most buoys on this mooring. This doesn't always save the instruments, though. Around Baffin Bay, in the "iceberg alley," entire moorings have been dragged away and never found. The fierce conditions of the Arctic are even hard on underwater instruments.
As a measure of how important all this is, most of the researchers and crew came out to watch the retrieval from the foredeck of the ship or from the bridge looking down on all the activity. The mooring was slowly winched on deck and the individual instruments detached and taken away, as the ship's crew looked on. Everything important was still attached to this mooring — only the buoys had been lost — and the data will be downloaded, the samples collected and the batteries recharged so the instruments can be tossed back into the ocean when the ship returns this way later in the season.
Sunday evening is a special event aboard Coast Guard vessels. The crew dresses in their formal uniforms and dinner is presented with a little more formality and accompanied by wine. I've been invited to the captain's table, which is a pleasant honour and an interesting way that naval tradition is maintained aboard ship. Afterwards, assuming I've been able to resist the captain's wine, I'm going to go and check out what's going on in some of the microbiology labs in the stern of the ship.
— Jim Lebans, south of Banks Island, aboard the Amundsen.
