over the hump!
day 29 | July 14, 2023
As of six days ago, on day #23 (Saturday July 8th), we officially hit the half-way point for our 45-day long research cruise. It’s been a wild ride so far – we’ve already collected data from over 100 stations, been out on the ice 14 times, spotted 9 polar bears (including two cubs!) and a countless number of walruses.
In these past three weeks, we’ve shifted out of the get to know you stage and into an era of friendly competition… the science team & crew have divvied into teams for both a cribbage and ping pong tournament; there have been poker nights & semi-aggressive games of bananagrams; we’ve started printing out the New York Times crossword puzzles and collaboratively solving them on the doors to the lab; and are even logging our time in the gym in an effort to collectively run/bike/row a distance equivalent to the journey between Nome (our starting point in Alaska) and our home-base of Stanford, California. Needless to say we’ve been keeping ourselves busy and have done lots of science as well! However, this post isn’t really going to be about science. In honor of reaching the half-way point, I want to bring you all aboard the R/V Sikuliaq & walk you through a day in my life aboard this arctic research cruise. Let’s back up in time a few days…
day 23 | Saturday July 8th
the halfway point of our journey, affectionately known as hump day!
2:45 am
Time to wake up! I don’t really consider myself to be someone with a good sleep schedule, but my sleep patterns on this ship have been exceptionally bizarre. I’m a part of the day shift, meaning I’m on from 3am — 3pm, so I have to get my zzz’s in sometime between 6pm (when dinner ends) and 3am. I aim to be in bed around 8pm and set my alarm for 2:45… giving me 15 minutes to throw on some clothes, brush my teeth, say goodnight to my roommate Abby (she’s on the night shift from 3pm-3am and comes up for bed right as I’m heading out), and head downstairs to the lab.
3:50 am
Today was a busy morning. We were in open water traveling around 10 knots (nautical miles per hour), meaning we covered the ~10 nautical miles or so between each station very quickly. The processing & filtering after each station typically takes around an hour so the work felt almost back to back. Filtering is my job and alongside my day shift partner Danny, I filter all the water we collect at different points & depths for chlorophyll and particulate organic carbon.
5:30 am
I decided to talk a walk around the deck during our break between stations. There’s something incredibly magical about watching the ship glide through the sea ice, each piece bobbing gently in our wake. Although it’s always a little chilly (typically ~32ºF or so), if the sun is shining and I bundle up, taking a walk around the deck is by far my favorite activity. Today was even better than normal, as there was a fog bow outside!
7:15 am
The best time of the day – breakfast time! We’ve been getting fed way too well on this boat, every breakfast typically consists of some sort of eggs, oats, sausage, a starch (pancakes, waffles, french toast, etc) & a buffet breakfast bar stocked with yogurt, granola, fruit, chia pudding, etc. A delicious reward for being 1/3 of the way through a shift (it hits at right around the 4 hour mark), the entirely of day shift is extremely punctual and heads up to the mess hall for breakfast precisely at 7:15.
8:10 am
Right after breakfast, it was my turn for polar bear watch. We do 2-hour long polar bear watches before every ice station, to insure that the area is bear-free before any science or crew members step foot onto the ice. Although these can feel a bit monotonous at times (staring through binoculars at endless ice isn’t always the most exciting thing…) today was the perfect example of why we need to do polar bear watch.
The instant I stepped up to the bridge (the top floor of the ship full of windows where the crew steers from), Danny yelled out to me – “Natalie, there’s a polar bear right there!” There were actually two, both pretty large healthy looking bears wandering around the ice. Although it delayed our ice station a bit, I didn’t mind as it meant I got to do my favorite activity – watching in awe as they wander around the ice.
9:20 am
After my ~hour long polar bear watch shift (we rotate out in an attempt to prevent anyone from having to stay up there too long), I headed back down to the lab right in time to filter! The CTD had just come up, ready and waiting for Danny and I to process the water.
10:30 am
Then it was time for me to do yet another polar bear watch shift, this one was uneventful compared to my first… thankfully, as we were about to head out onto the ice!
11:20 am
Once polar bear watch had been completed and the coast was deemed clear, I pulled on my mustang suit (full-length snow suit that doubles as a lifejacket if necessary), boots & gloves and headed out on the ice. We were drilling holes to collect ice cores (cylindrical samples that allow us to measure properties at different depths of the ice) as well as a hole to deploy a sediment trap into. Everything felt pretty routine until all of a sudden I heard a splash, I whipped my head around just in time to see a walrus tail disappear under the surface of the melt pond right behind us. It couldn’t have been more than 20 feet away – we were all dumbfounded for a second absolutely shocked that a walrus had been curious enough to get that close to us.
I kept my eyes peeled, and surely enough a couple minutes later a brown head popped up again. This time it was a little further out, in the open water surrounding our ice floe, but it wasn’t alone! It had a slightly smaller companion, likely a calf, diligently following in its mother’s wake. This trip has been full of unreal experiences, but I think this one might take the cake – never in my life did I think I’d be able to say I was within shouting distance of a walrus and her baby!
12:30 pm
After a quick lunch of corndogs, soup & salad, I headed back down to the lab to finish processing the ice samples. We add seawater to each of the jars to ensure the plankton stay alive as the ice melts (the sea ice melts into freshwater because all the salt gets pushed out when the water contracts to freeze into ice – wild I know!). We were efficient today and finished pretty much all the processing by the time 1 pm rolled around. So we passed the time by playing card games until the end of shift at 3 pm.
3:00 pm
12 hours later and another day shift in the books! At this time every day, night shift (the other half of the science party) stumbles down from their naps/workouts/late lunches and takes over from us. We catch up a little bit, as this is the biggest overlap in our days, but shortly after I headed back up to my room to relax for a couple of hours before …
5:00 pm
Dinner time! In celebration of reaching the halfway point on the cruise, Chef Evan went all out – treating us to a feast of king crab legs & corn on the cob. A great way to end the day, I never would’ve expected to be eating such luxurious items on a boat in the middle of the Arctic and am so incredibly grateful.
8:00 pm
After a couple post-dinner hours of chatting, doing some yoga & getting ready for bed I finally crawl under the covers of my bunk. Exhausted after the long eventful day, it barely takes me anytime to fall asleep as I’m slowly rocked back and forth by the slight swell of the ocean beneath me. I dream of polar bears, walruses, filtering for chlorophyll, and the surreal excitement of getting to wake up and do it all again tomorrow.
If you want even more of this day in the life perspective, go check out the video version I made documenting this day @polarplankton on either Instagram or TikTok!
In other updates, we are on our 5th cycle through our cruise track. We’ve been surveying up and down two (almost) vertical lines within the Chukchi Sea – making a bit of a rectangle as we move between them. As you can see in the plots below, we’ve done virtually the same path four times already, each time sampling from the same locations. We do this so that we can have a robust data set, capturing the conditions at different time periods. Specifically, at different time periods within the phytoplankton blooms.
In the plot below, warmer colors (red/orange) correspond to higher amounts of fluorescence (a variable that we use as a proxy for heightened primary production & phytoplankton/algae activity), while cooler colors (purples & blues) correspond to lower amounts of fluorescence.
Initially both of these lines were about half within the sea ice and about half within open water. Meaning the warmer colors you see in the top half of the later laps are under-ice blooms! The whole purpose of this cruise is to better understand when these under-ice blooms occur and what happens after them – therefore we’ve been sticking in this same spot & will continue to circle around until the bloom event ends and the entire plot has shifted over to cooler colors.
As mentioned earlier, all of the ice we are travelling through on this journey has been first year ice – meaning each year it forms in the cold winter months and melts in the warm summer months. This cycle has a great influence on the primary production patterns of this region, as well as provides a really fascinating thing to experience. As we get later in the summer season, the days have been getting warmer (by warmer, I only mean mid to high 30s rather than the low 30s we had at the beginning of the trip… don’t get too excited).
However, this couple of degrees increase has been enough to melt the sea ice and each time we return to a location, the ice has changed. Not only is there less of it, but it is also of different quality. It has become rotten, which believe it or not is the actual technical term for ice that is in the midst of melting, and becoming unsafe to physically go out and walk on. So we’ve reached a turning point in our journey, we likely will only have a couple more ice stations at the very northern points of our track lines & then shift to completely open water stations and deployments.
In commemoration of nearing the end of our ice stations please enjoy this compilation of (almost) our entire science team enjoying the sea ice:
More to come soon for our last two-ish weeks!
– Natalie
