Joanne De Laronde and Alex Hare take water samples
Right after breakfast this morning was the daily science leaders' meeting, which is where the carefully planned schedule established before the crew boarded the Amundsen gets shot right to heck. With a couple of dozen scientists on board, all competing to get the maximum amount of work done during the cruise, it's up to the Captain, the chief scientist Dr. Gary Stern, and ArcticNet coordinator Keith Levesque to figure out exactly how time and space can be stretched to make everyone happy. It costs about $40,000 a day for ship time and that's a strong motivation to use the time as fully and efficiently as possible, which is why the scientists are often working around the clock. Through last night, for example, the "Rosette" – a water-sampling device - was lowered three times at three different locations during brief stops. Tonight we reach the first major sampling stop, where several of the teams will be taking turns gathering water samples from different depths, using fine nets to trap plankton and zooplankton, and doing sediment sampling from the sea floor. We arrive at the site at 6:30 p.m., and the last job – the sediment sampling – won't likely even get started until 1 in the morning.
The Rosette Rises
Anyway, as to the carefully planned schedule, it rarely holds up against first contact with the ocean. First there are just the mistakes. A simple misunderstanding or two means several more jobs have to be squeezed in that hadn't been anticipated. Then there are the weather and sea conditions, which haven't, I must say, been what I had feared. The temperature is hovering around freezing and there was a little light snow this morning, but the sea has been calm, and thankfully the ship isn't being affected much by it. I'm not prone to seasickness, but you never want to tempt fate. The snow was, however, just enough to reduce visibility for the helicopter pilot. He was to have taken a 60km flight to pick up the ship's wildlife observer from the village of Holman, on Victoria Island. Instead, the ship had to detour to get closer to the island where the weather was clearer for the pick-up.
The Rosette
The wildlife observer has an interesting role on the mission. It's usually a person from one of the local northern communities who's responsibility it is to keep an eye out for whatever animals the ship might encounter – whales, seals, seabirds, and of course Polar Bears in season. Partly this is to contribute to the research, as a survey of the variety and number of animals the Amundsen might encounter. Partly it's also to monitor and track whether the ship is having any negative effects on Arctic wildlife during the cruise and as research is being done. Naturally, locals have a sharper and more experienced eye for the life around this area, so it's important to bring them in because they'll do a better job than the microbiologists and chemists aboard ship. It's also, however, an important way to involve the local communities in the research being carried out on the Amundsen.
A day on the Amundsen generally involves a series of stops of varying durations at "stations" where different kinds of scientific sampling is done. Samples have been taken at these sites in past years, and will continue to be taken in the future, to get a baseline on the various oceanographic and biological features the scientists are looking at. The minimum that is done is water sampling using a device I mentioned earlier, the Rosette. The Rosette looks like something that could be a doomsday weapon from a recent-vintage James Bond movie. It's a cylindrical steel cage about a meter across, containing a couple of dozen long tubes – bottles really -- with caps on the top and bottom. The caps are left open when the Rosette is lowered into the water and some caps are closed, sealing the bottles, when the Rosette reaches different depths in the water, down to about 150 meters. The samples can then be studied by different teams for water salinity, chemical contaminants, and for the different kinds of life likely to be in them, from viruses to bacteria to plankton to zooplankton to fish larvae. Knowing which animals are present at which depths, and more importantly, whether the life is changing, is the important information that can be gleaned from these samples.
Tonight is a longer stop, with several other activities as well as three different Rosette samplings. There were two trawls using fine nets to capture more zooplankton and fish larvae. Much of the catch was destined to go to Dr. Gary Stern's team from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which is studying chemical contaminants in the Arctic. They'll be looking for things like flame-retardants, PCBs, dioxins and mercury, which accumulate in the Arctic because of weather patterns. It's been known for some years that many of these chemicals, which generally are produced as gas from smokestacks and other sources in the south, tend to accumulate in the Arctic. The gaseous chemicals condense into liquid when they circulate northwards and encounter cold arctic air, and they literally rain out onto the land and oceans up here. They tend to be absorbed by the phytoplankton in the water, which are then eaten by zooplankton, which in turn are consumed by creatures going up the food chain. Dr Stern and his team are particularly interested in mercury, which has recently been jumped to levels four times higher than had previously been detected in Beluga whales. They have a number of potential explanations for this, and all of them implicate climate change – but to learn more about how this is going to work, you'll need to listen to my reports on Quirks & Quarks when I get back.
- Jim Lebans – aboard CCGS Amundsen, off the coast of Victoria Island.
