April 10 – UD Student Visit Continues

We were told this morning that the flight back for the boys was around 3pm so we agreed that Jackie’s tour starting at 08:30 around the perimeter would be a good way to get an overview of the spots to get good stereo shots. We loaded up a whole bunch of us on the wooden pallets that are pulled behind the big camp Alpine ski doos and also two small ski doos. (Katharine, Adrian, Mani, Scott, myself, Bruce, Jackie, Dan). It felt like a real sleigh ride. We started down the runway to the first feature which was near the 500m mark on Line #4 where a narrow lead had been working. The frost flowers have been incredible lately so the whole idea of a tour in such fine weather with little wind was just a super idea. We had Art (from Polar Palooza) with us to get Jackie’s tour lecture on film and that was just great. It really was a full scale educational tour with Jackie providing us with 20 years of insight in the field with all the features she has ever seen in the Arctic right here within a 3 km box.

We traveled around and saw the following things in the following order:
• (as above) Line #4 near 500m refrozen lead
• Big block of multiyear heaved up which had a refrozen melt pond (absolutely crystal clear with no salinity at all). Within the ice layers, the refrozen melt pond is a brilliant clear blue but a small piece nearby that had broken out was absolutely translucent clear with chandelier air bubbles inside.
• Shear ridge with no ice blocks at all, just these amorphous jumbles of crushed ice as a result of shearing, grinding action by lateral motion of the floes next to each other. Jackie and Bruce have named it the cauliflower ridge.
• The next few (part of the perimeter survey) were a collection of ridges at different stages of development from just a few humps that looked like the ice was punched from below, to small linear features, and then larger ones as we moved around about 1.5 km from camp in a clockwise direction from Line #4 to Line #1. At this point, Jackie commented that this collection of features was a rarity given the presence of so many dynamic features in close proximity based on 20 years of field experience.
• At about Line #6 the features were larger (north edge of the walking limits) so Jackie found a good spot to explain a feature called a Rubble Field which looks like something you would never want to traverse with anything involving a sled or a snow machine. It just looked like brutal topography to traverse. Someone had commented that such a rubble is the one that prevented Nansen from reaching the North Pole as his ship had come around to the Russian side which is noted for its rubble field icescape.
• We approached the end of our tour by coming around to Jen’s main ridge site then onward to two more very big ridge sites between Line #1 and Line #2.

The tour went later than expected and we were all cold when we returned but it was absolutely worth it. While we warmed up in the mess hut with cocoa, tea, coffee, and cookies, we asked about an update on our flight and found out it had been moved up an hour and a half. So we pounded down some cookies and chocolates and set off at 11am to get to work on the stereo stuff. We went straight for Jen’s ridge because that was the highest priority. We were fortunate that the diver hold plugs were lying about as these were great geometric cylinders lying on their side with a center hole (see stereo report). We measured one of them extensively and took both still and video takes around it. Then we proceeded to work on the ridge. We got about half way through the ridge when we were called up again and informed that we had to return at 12:45 because the plane was leaving promptly at 1pm (yet another schedule move up). So Mani, Scott, and I made yet another backup plan and decided on a strategy for me to take over their effort by repeating Jackie’s survey the following morning and getting the data to them upon my return. So we hurried back to the camp (bags were already packed). Mani and Scott unloaded their 2 HP cameras and the tripod and we confirmed all the camera settings. We decided to confine the sensitivity study to the cylinder we had already photographed. We were a bit bummed that we had our time cut so short yet again, but that is life in the Arctic. Despite the constantly compressing schedule, my UD team worked with its usual wonderful efficiency and we had a wonderful experience. We didn’t get to the cricket match, Mani and Scott missed a meal, but we had an incredible time with very good weather for the short period of time they were allowed to participate.

In the back of my mind as I waved goodbye and wished them well back to Fairbanks, I was already formulating the next level of requirements for bringing my students with me the next time such an opportunity arises. I have an outstanding team and I am so very proud of both Mani and Scott for making it here. We all wished that Chandra could have joined us and in the next experiment (should opportunity arise), I will make sure that he does with a bold requirement that my students get to be on the ice as much as possible.

I went to the mess to work out some IceSat orbits after that whirlwind and at about 16:30 (local time) the helo came back with Stefan and Torge several minutes still left on their flight. They burst into the mess tent to tell me that they had found the missing buoys. The person on radio duty told me I was clear to go after a refuel. Feeling that I might be able to make up for the failed buoy recovery yesterday, I went ahead and tried to retrieve the buoys. Sure enough there they were 7 km out (5 km more than anticipated). So we have a strange array but it is finally collected. When I landed I came back to camp absolutely psyched about the accomplishment. The joy was dashed into a state of bittersweet when I went to check back in at the command hut. The radio person informed me that he had not called Jenny so I was in hot water for taking an unauthorized flight that I thought had been cleared. He took the heat and we both went into quiet mode the rest of the night. I finished up the rest of my work for the day and then headed to bed in hopes of a better day tomorrow.