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!