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.