Start of Science Day - 3 April

Woke up this morning planning on getting a helo ride to the far side of a lead to deploy the last three of my GPS buoys. The horizon was flat (couldn’t tell ice from sky) so the chopper pilot had us wait, and wait, and wait, and wait. Two hours later he came into the command hut and said it was a scrubbed until after lunch. I had already sent out my survey team so I started prepping two sleds for snow pit density measurements. I got about 2/3 of the way done before lunch. After lunch Robert said he wanted the afternoon off from field work to catch up with journaling and since he had done every single survey line with me (and even the last one as lead) he really deserved some down time.

After lunch just as I was about to go out with my snow team, the helo pilot came in to ask if we wanted to try again in 15 minutes so Jackie and I scrambled to get buoys together and be ready at the helicopter. The two cooks came with us and we started to load up two buoys, garbage bag to mark the site, a shovel to fill the bags with snow for marking, and a compass to figure out heading, etc. Just as we were finishing up the helo safety briefing, one of the Tigress fellows (documentary folks) came over and asked to join. The pilot said we were leaving in one minute so the fellow (Richard) ran back, grabbed his camera and showed up. The rest of us were already in our seats and the pilot was getting ready to take off. Richard did this so quickly that the pilots had to radio the command that an additional passenger just came onboard. We were already quite tightly packed in, so it felt very uncomfortable. Jackie and I worked with the helo team to figure out where the first 5 buoys were deployed. We needed to pick up one of the buoys to make a parallelogram and we only had 7 buoys left because two got fried and two were being used for a compass as the floe we are on has been turning in this very dynamic region. So the helo landed near the farthest one out and Jackie hopped out to go get it. We went across the refrozen lead (about 1 km) to look for suitable sites. We put the first buoy in and then did a retrack back to the camp side buoys and aligned our trajectory relative to the first buoy, the deployed buoys, and the camp to triangulate the remaining buoys. At each landing we hopped off, grabbed our cooler buoy, carried it to a good location, connected to power, closed the box and loaded up the garbage bag with snow as a marker to find the buoys. We did this 3 times with the Tigress guy sweating to try and keep up with us. He said it felt like a commando raid science style.

When we got back from that exhausting effort, I had to get something quick and warm and then head out in the mid afternoon (about 3pm) to start the snow density survey. Adrian and Katharine came with me. Like with every new effort things start slow so I planned on just trying to complete Line #1 before dinner (4 hours). We started at the center stake so that we could do a dry run to see what equipment we might be missing. We were missing a couple of things so I walked back for them. At the 300m mark I realized that I had also forgotten the radio and the rifle so I walked all the way back for those. The measurements were laid out such that we did bulk density every 100m and then a snow pit every 500m. This gives us a total of 12 snow pits and 60 bulk densities. Bruce and Jackie were running the EM and the Magnaprobe, with the Magnaprobe recording snow thickness every 5 m which works out to 200 measurements a line or 1200 thicknesses for the array. It was slow going for the first line but by the end we figured out some improvements for the next day. When we got back we worked up the data, weighed our snow samples and modified our gear for the next day.


It was a warm day with temperatures in the 20’s F by mid-day. Thank goodness for layers because we were stripping them off. At dinner we experienced ice rime which feels like fog but is apparently somewhat different.