Lots of ice, a polar bear and science!

We’ve been at sea a little over a week now. Currently, we’re in the Beaufort Sea, in Canadian waters near the McKenzie River outflow. We recovered and redeployed the Arctic Observing Network (AON) mooring last week, then headed east into the ice toward the sampling stations where we are at now. We are collecting a bunch of data from sensors deployed on the rosette (shown below) – temperature, salinity, depth, chlorophyll, fluorescence, and water samples at different depths that are analyzed for several different things that I may elaborate on in future posts.

I brought instruments called chipods that attach to the rosette that measure the temperature really fast (100 times per second) which we then use in addition to some of the other parameters computed from data collected on the rosette and some mathematical theories to compute turbulent dissipation rates. Higher dissipation rates indicate places where mixing is happening between different water masses and where heat and energy is redistributed. One analogy to describe this is -- we have a cup of coffee and pour cream into it and it swirls around and will eventually mix altogether, but if we take a spoon and stir the liquid in that cup, this causes higher amounts of turbulence which will combine the coffee and cream more quickly. Our hand/spoon is the ‘event’ that causes greater amounts of turbulence.

The temperatures have been quite cold, but it has been clear, so we’ve gotten to see some spectacular sunrises and sunsets. The sun rises at about 10am right now and setting at 3:30pm. Lucky for us, it also was clear last night to see the lunar eclipse. We have seen a few seals and a few days ago, polar bear tracks along the ice next to where the ship was driving. Today, at sunrise, we saw a polar bear sleeping and then it woke up as the ship drove by (we were quite a distance) and lumbering around a bit. Hopefully, we get to see more :)