Not Quite Totten

Map of the coastline showing the ice conditions. The orange line is the ship's track from Casey. The Dalton polynya is on the right, next to the Moscow ice shelf. The crack we were going to use to get to the Totten glacier is the red line running from the polynya to the glacier between the fast ice and ex-fast ice. 

Emperor penguin 

The morning before we entered the Dalton polynya, the ship was moving through thick sea ice. The first thing I noticed when I got up, was the thick fog, the second, that the ship was going backwards – that didn’t bode well. It was slow going into the Dalton polynya. When we entered the polynya it was super calm. There was no wind, no swell, the ocean was glassed out. There were emperor penguins everywhere, with Weddell seals and Crabeaters too.

The most stunning icebergs on Earth

That night the ship entered a stretch of giant icebergs. It was like a dreamscape, there was a feeling of serenity that lasted all night.

At the time I realised I had become blasé about where I was and what I was seeing. So few people on earth will get to experience the things I did. It all came back to me up on the bridge, watching these stunning bergs hanging in the stillness. I am so very lucky. We were travelling to somewhere that no other boat has ever been. No humans have ever been this far inside the Dalton polynya or this close to the Totten glacier.

“I will miss the beauty I have seen down here.”

On entering the polynya, the marine science portion of the trip began in earnest. We started collecting CTD’s and almost everyone was involved. CTD’s (Conductivity Temperature Depth) are a type of water sample. Basically a large metal circular frame with 24 niskin bottles arranged around in a rosette is lowered into the ocean close to the bottom.

CTD - niskin bottles arranged in a rosette 

The frame has sensors for chlorophyll, oxygen, turbidity, current, as well as Conductivity Temperature and Depth. As the rosette is winched back up certain bottles are triggered to close and trap the water from that depth inside. Each bottle holds 10 litres and scientists take different measurements from each bottle. I am helping out one of the chlorophyll guys.  Everyone has to wait their turn to collect water, as it is precious and some samples need to be read straight away (e.g.O2 and CO2 sampling is done first, as they are volatile gases). Chlorophyll goes last which is good, there’s less pressure I will fuck it up. Basically I collect water from 6 bottles according to the minimum and maximum depth of chlorophyll, and then I filter about of litre from each bottle. Drop the filter in a cryovial and into liquid N2, easy peasy.

Science with a view

To be honest, I think the water chemistry stuff is pretty boring science (not like exciting microplastics!), but nearly everyone on here are physical oceanographers so I keep those opinions to myself :P I’m only on shift for two hrs a day between 12-2pm, so there a good chance in that time I won’t have to take more than one sample a day when we are in CTD mode. I actually collected some water for Susan from a couple of CTDs but not until we reached the SR3 transect.

On New Year’s Eve we stopped again for the sea ice team to sample a flow.  I spent several hours up on the bridge helping the voyage leader coordinate the sea ice team. Basically, I recorded the people on an off the ice. But I also spotted a crack in the sea ice that we had to keep an eye on. And I was stand-in voyage leader on the radio when he walked off to make tea. Very glamorous job, huge responsibility. The only sucky thing was that one of the sea ice team accidently lost a piece of plastic and it blew off in the sea. It was so depressing. Such a stunning and ‘pristine’ place and we drop rubbish.

Drilling ice cores to look for trace metals

New Year's was pretty ‘chill’. We rang in the near year playing games like ‘ticket to ride’, (which honestly should be Dan's favourite game). Most people were on shift for the CTDs. We spent a good portion of the evening trying to climb around furniture without touching the ground. I sucked at it, by the way. I have no body core strength.

For the stroke of midnight, Steve, Matt, Zane, Tom and I went up to the helideck and counted down to midnight. We came back down to the conference room and celebrated with everyone else. Hugging and drinking mocktails (coke and a slice of orange). Later, we went up to the monkey deck to hang out. We were expecting a blizzard, so the wind had picked up and it was super cold up there, -0.90 °C with a 29kn wind (-10 with the wind chill). We were leaning into the wind and it held us up. Laughing like idiots. My face went numb from the cold. It was so much fun. Icebergs, light at midnight, great company, what a magical way to ring in 2017! Happy New Year!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! Image by Matt Corkill 

New year’s day marked three weeks to go. My trip was more than half over.
The ‘blizzard’ finally hit, but I don’t think the visibility got low enough to actually classify as a blizzard. But we did have snow and 50kn winds. I was moderately impressed, we weren’t even allowed outside.

We never made it to the Totten Glacier, the crack we were aiming for that ran along the front of the glacier closed up in the strong winds. But we did make it further closer to the glacier than anyone had been since the 70s. So we cut our losses and turned back out the way we came to headed off to the Mertz glacier. We did make it to the Moscow university ice shelf. The Russians are the only ones who had explored that part of Antarctic and all the charts were in Russian, which I thought was pretty funny.

“The sun is finally out! Nope JK. Its gone”.

Blue Whale

As soon as we were cruising in open water the whales returned. I saw humpbacks quite close to the ship. I noticed that whenever we get relatively close to humpbacks, they fin slap – are they trying to shoo us away or say hello? I also saw a long way off in the distance, through the binoculars, a big whale dive, its fluke was all black and quite truncate. I secretly hope it was a sperm whale. We never saw it again.  There were also massive blows out on the horizon, bigger than all the blows closer, straight up and very high. They were Blue whales, with blow that reaches 9 meters. A little humpback calf and its mum came to visit the ship. The calf decided to show off in front of the ship. A couple of us followed them down to the focsle and he surprised us by breaching twice very close by. What a frickin cutie.

A little breaching calf

The ship's position on the 6/1/17

Before reaching the Mertz we stopped off at the SR3 transect to collect more CTDs. The SR3 transect seems to be some of routinely monitored transect to look as water masses. I needed to collect samples from Susan from the CTD along this transect. We were sampling 24hrs a day with krill trawling thrown in the mix (which I was also sampling). Luckily, I had Ella to help me collect samples so I could sleep a few hours between the krill trawls. It was a bit hectic during those days but I didn’t feel as sleep deprived as I thought I would. The SR3 line also took us close to Dumont d'Urville, the French research station, and close enough to the magnetic South Pole that I got to see the ships compass pointing in the wrong direction (pointing south when we were actually travelling east). Luckily, there are more accurate ways to navigate than a compass these days.

“Before this trip I have never eaten so many tim tams in my life, or had this many cups of tea”.