We had our first sight of Greenland at 14:30 on the 11th. The rising sea became more littered with icebergs and coastal debris on our track west, toward the coast. As we approached land, the immense size of the rugged mountains and glaciers became more apparent and impressive. Giant horns towered over a coast strewn with remnants of the ranges erosion. I went up to the bridge to get a better look at the landscape and, as luck would have it, I got to see a couple of pilot whales and this pea soup thick fog bank rushing in to obliterate our sightseeing. It was all really breathtaking– one of those moments that I stopped to actively appreciate how rare and amazing this experiences is.
With mooring deployment consuming all the daylight hours, CDT casts have all been scheduled at night, which has made Larik and my shift very busy. The nights of the 11th and 13th were especially hectic when we were doing a casts for a high resolution data collection of the Eastern Greenland coast, in an attempt to get a better understanding of the Eastern Greenland Current. We had ten minutes between cast until 4:00, which meant starting the set up for a deployment as we finished the last cast. We real got into a rhythm at about midnight on the first night making the rest of the night and subsequent days easier and more fun. Larik is even teaching me some Russian as we work, including songs from famous Russian musicals, in trade for the conversational English lessons I’m giving him.
On the night of the 12th, we spent the night “mowing the lawn”, which means steering the ship on a grid pattern course collecting bathymetry data. We used the soundings with their latitudes and longitudes to create a contour map of the sea bottom around the area we’re putting the mooring tomorrow. It really gave me a better sense of what we’re looking at on the echo sounder screen and how “right” my previous interpretations of the data was, also how to infer a more realistic picture of what the bottom looks like. In the past I’ve only been on ships that have gone to established mooring sites, where we’ve recovered and re-deployed moorings. This trip is much more involved, having to establish a site, installing the moorings in a reasonable and advantageous spot.
I’ve been working with Nick, the technician, on the Seabeam software, attempting to sort out the bugs in the system. The Seabeam has been down since the ship tapped the bottom leaving WHOI. Just enough water got in to scramble the system but not destroy it. Fixing this system would allow us to use the ships high resolution bathymetry system and have a far better understanding of what the sea looks like at the mooring sites. We are getting really close. The computers are finally talking to us and system seems to be awakening from its coma.
We had a minor accident Friday morning as Larik and I were bringing the CTD out of some pretty rough seas. The Winch operator miscalculated the speed he needed to come out of the water and drove the CTD up into the winch block, it’s called two blocking. Our tugger winch’s groaned under the strain of the sudden yank until we quickly let out line. The cable eye was pulled beyond its breaking strength, thus needed to be replaced. Looking on the bright side, no one was hurt and I got to observe how a replace the eye on a steel cable, but it did shut down work for a couple hours.
It’s Sunday and we’ve made it to the Labrador Sea after an epic crossing through the Prince Christian Sound. We spent last night doing XBT cast on the west coast of Greenland. XBT’s are a onetime use temperature probe that we send down as far as 1830 meters so researchers get a feel for the water column. Historically XBT’s were “… prepared “by rubbing a bit of skunk oil on with a finger and then wiping off with the soft side of one’s hand,” followed by smoking the slide over the flame of a Bunsen burner.”, but lucky it’s all done by a simple instrument and some software at this point. These XBT’s, CTD’s, and the Bathymetry work of the last few days are all in preparation for the mooring that we get started with on Monday morning at 6:00.
Life is good.