Photo credit: Bob Pickart
Photo credit: Bob Pickart
With a few exceptions, the weather was ferociously stormy the whole time we were in the Lab Sea. Here are a few photos of the conditions we encountered:
Photo credit: Bob Pickart
Photo credit: Bob Pickart
Photo credit: Bob Pickart
Another part of my job was deploying XBT's (Expendable Bathythermographs). This is a torpedo-shaped probe (seen in its launcher in my right hand in the picture below) which falls through the water reporting water temperature back to the ship via a long thin copper cable which unspools as it falls. We deployed these from the stern of the ship, which wasn't always safe...
Wed, 12 Feb 1997 Last night we had some entertainment deploying an XBT. The bridge decided to continue on-course during deployment instead of turning into the wind. My coworker Dan lent his videocamera to Bob (the chief scientist) to tape us as we went out to launch it. The playback shows us walking out, me holding the XBT and the radio, Dan carrying the launching tube which sticks out over the rail during the cast. Then the ship's tail lurches downward, and the camera sees black foam coming up from behind/below us. The camera goes jerking out in random directions, and Bob (father of four, and it shows) yells "grab the safety line, grab the rail!" And then the camera shuts off. It wasn't that bad, actually: the wave didn't actually come on deck. But it looked cool. We launched the XBT, then went back to the hangar to wait for the probe to fall through 2 kilometers of icy water. Bob left with the camera to put gloves on, and that's when the real wave came. It submerged the launcher up to about head height, and came over the rail where we'd been standing 30 seconds earlier. We didn't try that wind-astern trick again.
The picture below shows the deployment of a VCM, or Vertical Current
Meter, float. It drifts through the deep ocean, ascending to the
surface to report its location (and the temperature and salinity of
the water column) to a satellite. The propeller-like attachment, when
combined with a magnetic compass, allow it to measure vertical flow
speeds as well.
Photo credit: Bob Pickart
Thu, 20 Feb 1997The picture of the owl below is a frame captured from video footage taken by my shipmate, Dan Torres. As is typical of video captures, it's pretty muddy. The owl is in the shadowed area at the center of the frame.
A storm three days ago left us a gift: an arctic snowy owl landed on the bow during the storm, and has stuck around since. It's not an open-ocean bird, and apparently got blown out to sea accidentally, so it's very lucky it found us. One of the sailors, who knows about these things, says it eats small land birds (it only needs one a week), and can live out on sea ice... by coincidence, we're headed toward the sea ice on the Labrador coast. So if it doesn't starve to death in the next week, it should be okay.
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Sarah Zimmerman, arctic explorer extraordinaire.
Photo credit: Bob Pickart
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