Ice. Mud. Ice. Polarbear. Ice. Mud. Ice.

Onroute towards the ice!

As part of the ARISE project, Emma Burns is studying Arctic mud as part of her PhD. She uses a megacorer to depths around 3000 m, it sinks into the sea floor filling up the tubes with mud creating cores. These cores are sliced into thin sections and frozen to be sent back for analysis back in the UK.

 

Mud corer going down to 2500 m

Looking out for wildlife whilst waiting for the corer to come back up

''We look at the sediments to determine the original source of the ‘food’ component within them. It could have originally been on land around the ocean and has been washed in by rivers or erosion of the coast. It could also have been made my marine life, little shells that are left behind when an animal dies.'' Emma Burns

Louisa and Ian put the bung in to contain the sample within the corer

Carrying the samples back to the lab...whilst thinking do not drop do not drop

Why so serious!? Lots of concentrating going on in the wet lab whilst cutting the cores.

Here Louisa and Emma slice the cores to be kept in the -80

Ash doing the very important job of holding the cores whilst Emma slices them!


These cores will be used to measure the isotopic signatures to understand how much the land contributes to the oceanic sediments and how much the marine pool does also. This is important in the Arctic Ocean because increasing temperatures mean there is more material being delivered from the land.

After that mud station we headed further North East and into the ice to our one shelf station.


Entering the ice fields

All the diatoms that live on the bottom of the sea ice getting turned over and seeing light for the first time in 6/8 months as the ship ploughs on through

Lots of snow, no blue skies

I love sea ice algae

We were stuck here a few days whilst the ship had a few technical issues...we also had a few scientific equipment issues. Now all resolved.

Polar bear photos courtesy of Emma. As we waited for everything to be fixed we were woken up in the middle of the morning to see our first polar bear of the trip. They are magnificent creatures!

So serious.

 Now we are steaming North just out of the ice and into the brash ice where we hope to get to the F-line to sample along towards Svalbard.


Snow on the deck!

 

 

Snow on the deck and massive waves!!!!!

 

 

We are now a far cry away from Immingham steaming steadily North and completing science enroute.

Running outside to get some sun before the fog surrounds us again! There is lots of fog in the arctic due to the warm atlantic water and the different airmasses flowing over top!

 My favourite passtime at the moment is watching the birds do beat ups along the side of the ship. They also use the waves to get extra energy to get higher.

Science is happening. We are currently trying to get into a day and nighttime cycle to capture the plankton that hiberate at depth (diapause). We are doing lots of CTDs which involves the probes which collect temperature, depth, oxygen, salinity and floruesence data. We then collect the water and filter it onto different sizes of filters to be analysed for POM, DIC, Fatty acids and many more biological things back at the lab!



We are in the middle of the NT line, the last red dot is in the ice so it's about to get even more exciting! We are then heading for the F-line but we are not sure how far east we can go before the ice is too thick. We are having major kit issues at the moment which are all being quickly resolved; when these are fixed I will do some more indepth blogs about the individual projects that are happening on this cruise!

Almost at our first Science station!

Each one of these dots is our position report...between each dot is about 1/2 hours! We are steaming at a steady 13 knots. Here's the webcam so you can see what we can see, it will be more exciting in a week where you might be able to spot a polar bear on the ice: http://mx10-8-202-54.jcr.nerc-bas.ac.uk/cgi-bin/guestimage.html 

 

We are rapidly steaming North, the air is noticeably cooler! North of Iceland and adjacent to the top of Norway we are almost reaching our first station. Today we start coring the deep benthic mud. Then tomorrow is day filled with oceanography where we collect water from the CTD and plankton from the bongo nets. My next blog will give more detail about why we are actually here and what we are studying!

As you can see from this updated satellite image of the sea ice in the Arctic, there is a line of brash ice where we are heading. This is a good sign meaning that the ice is moving around the stations that we are heading to sample from. The air temperature and the water temperature is increasing slowly so as we move further north we are hoping that our sampling stations will be accessible before we steam east to get dropped off in Svalbard!

Crossing the Arctic circle!

This year the three Changing Arctic Ocean cruises (CAO) are being separated. So we are kicking off this years CAO cruise with the DIAPOD and ARISE team, we will then jump off in Longyearbean in Svalbard the PRIZE team will then jump off and head up the Barents sea to complete a similar transect that we did last year then finally the last cruise will be CHAOS who will also be going up the Barents sea. The JCR will then come home to Southampton where all 4 projects will collect their scientific gear and valuable (and rather expensive) precious samples!!!!

Such a mighty vessel...she's been in action for almost 28 years. Newly built containers these days only last 15 years, so it's great to see how integral the building material used on the JCR is to make it still in action at what is seen as quite old for a vessel!

The X-MEN are protecting us on this cruise.

I am going to spend a lot of time on this cruise looking at beasties under the microscope...will this make me seasick..? Stay tuned to find out.

I spent many hours earlier on this week ensuring that everyone's chemicals had the correct MSDS paperwork, COSHH, safe systems of work and that they were all in the correct container for the correct ventilation and hazard class of the chemical..! I learnt a lot.



We spent a week in Immingham (mingingham) loading the ship for this years cruises.

Dave Pond my boss and our PSO for the cruise looking happy with his filtration rig!

Filtering water is serious work! I have to behave on this cruise (ha) as both my boss and line manager are here to keep me in check!

How many people does it take to make a microscope/camera work....!?

We completed a shake down station today to test all of the equipment! We got some live zooplankton in these bongo nets so that we could test our incubators/respiration equipment/filtration rigs/microscopes!

Lots of people interested in the bongo nets

The last few days we've been in the fog so not much opportunity to spot wildlife or read a book on deck! Really earie.

The fog dissipated near when we crossed the Arctic Circle giving us a fantastic sunset...it's much lighter already giving us very long days which is going to be great if we have to do nightshifts. Bring on the ice, so excited!

 

We have been on the ship for a week now and have finally crossed the Arctic circle!!!! We stayed up until midnight last night to cross the line. Can't believe this is my second time crossing the arctic circle on a ship (hopefully I get another certificate). It's definitely less smelly and scary than crossing the equator on a ship as you do not need to ask permission from King Neptune to cross into the Arctic Circle!!

Feeling at home on the sea :)

 On Tuesday we will be at our first station so stay tuned to hear about what we're actually doing up in the Arctic this year!!

Blog live again - heading back to the Arctic for more science.

Hello from the RRS James Clark Ross..have I been here before?

Yes! Last year I was on the JCR heading to the Barents sea in the Arctic... This year on the same project that's called DIAPOD we are heading up the Fram Strait to complete similar work. So lots of filtering water and plankton nets.

I'm off to do the lifeboat drill but for now here's our new website for the changing artic ocean programme:https://www.changing-arctic-ocean.ac.uk/