Helen Fields » Bering Sea

science, journalism, and knitting on ice

Helen — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:33:30 +0000

This afternoon at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, I’m giving a talk with the clever title “Science, Journalism and Knitting on Ice: My Six-week Adventure in the Bering Sea.” I’ll be talking about my 2009 Bering Sea trip. I really am planning to tell some stories about knitting, but mostly it’ll be about how science gets done on a big ship in the middle of the ice.

If you know anyone in or near Appleton, tell them to come! Here’s the information.

book! book! book!

Helen — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:26:24 +0000

Fantastic photographer Chris Linder has a new photography book, Science on Ice, about four expeditions to the cold and icy parts of our planet. Including one to the Bering Sea. Sound familiar? That’s right, it’s the expedition I went on.

I wrote a chapter about Chris’s and my Bering Sea expedition. Hugh Powell wrote about Adélie penguins in Antarctica, Lonny Lippsett wrote about exploring the Arctic floor from an icebreaker, and Amy Nevala wrote about Greenland’s glaciers. Of course, Chris’s fantastic photos fill the book.

It’s been fun revisiting my memories of the Bering Sea in the last few days, since my copy arrived. I also answered some questions by e-mail for this nice item about it…and went on much too long. I just kept remembering all these lovely details about the trip. It was a great experience.

blogger in the Arctic

Helen — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 04:37:05 +0000

A few weeks ago I got a call from Haley Smith Kingsland, a student at Stanford who was getting ready to be the blogger for a research cruise on the USCGC Healy. She was looking for advice, based on my six weeks on the Healy last year. So, after a winter getting gussied up in dry dock, Healy is out on the ocean again. This cruise started in Dutch Harbor last week, and they’ve already gone up through the Bering Strait to the Arctic. The science mission has something to do with figuring out how climate change will affect the Arctic ecosystem.

Read Haley’s one-woman blog here. It’s all her – the pictures, the writing, everything. Whew. She’s also tweeting and writing on her own blog (in theory, anyway – she hasn’t posted since heading up to Alaska).

In other cruise news, some of the folks who I was on the Healy with last year are out in the Bering Sea right now on the R/V Thompson; read chief scientist Dave Shull’s blog posts. You may remember him from the epic tales Under the Ice and The Story of Thorium.

bering sea haiku

Helen — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 11:40:40 +0000

I first set foot on the USCGC Healy a year ago today. To mark this anniversary, I present: haiku.

Eat a big breakfast
Put on the waterproof suit
No bathroom break now.

Long day on the ice
Did I get the quotes I need?
I don’t know – naptime.

Vast expanse of ice
Brownish, mucky patches, too
Filthy walruses.

In the science lounge
Give the internet a try
Server can’t be found.

Ice breaking loudly
What’s that horrible odor?
Sewage discharge time.

photo: Chris Linder. See our dispatches from the Bering Sea here.

photographer in antarctica

Helen — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:20:45 +0000

Chris Linder, the photographer who took me to the Bering Sea, is on another adventure – in Antarctica on an Artists & Writers grant. He’s there to take pictures of south polar skuas, which means several weeks camping at Cape Crozier penguin colony. No blogging from the field this time, but you can follow him on twitter…if they get the internet setup at Cape Crozier fixed.

Yes…yes, I do wish he’d needed a writer this time. Sigh.

why you don’t leave a car for six weeks

Helen — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 03:09:59 +0000

I learned a ton of awesome things when I was in the Bering Sea this spring. I also learned one important lesson when I got home: Don’t leave your car for six weeks without driving it. I guess since I drive my car so rarely anyway, it didn’t seem like a big deal to just let it sit there for a while. Ok, so, one new battery and one scraping-of-rust-off-brakes later, I’d learned my $500 lesson. Since my mechanic had the car anyway, I had him disconnect the central locking system, which is one of the dumber features of the ’93 Jetta, and I’ve been much happier ever since.

Until Wednesday night, when I discovered that the central locking system unlocks the little door over the gas cap. Let me tell you, I had a perplexing couple of minutes at the gas station before I figured that out. I called the mechanic today, he told me how to open the gas thing from inside the trunk, and everything’s good. But look what happens when you don’t get gas for three months:

Stinging beasties have babies in your car.

seasons

Helen — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:55:24 +0000

Several people have asked if it was strange coming back from the Bering Sea, where I considered 35 degrees Fahrenheit to be seriously balmy, to D.C., where it’s 88 degrees right now. The answer is, actually, no. The majority of the time I was up there, I was in a heated ship – it’s not like I was camping for 40 days – and there hasn’t been much of a temperature shock.

What’s really weird is the light. It feels like I came back to winter. I can’t believe it’s already dark by 9 p.m. Where are my midnight sunsets, I ask you?

Also, there are no baby seals here. Lame.

links-a-million

Helen — Tue, 19 May 2009 06:07:40 +0000

I’m finding myself kind of homesick for the Healy, so here are some of the links I’ve used to drown my sorrows.

Simone Welch, an elementary school from D.C., was on the cruise, too. She got super hands-on with the science, helping out several teams and learning lots of cool stuff, like how to do the hand signals for the winch.

Every hour, this website updates with the latest view from atop the ship. They’re in Juneau right now.

The Healy‘s public affairs officer writes a weekly update for friends and families. Before the trip, these were basically gibberish. (“Quarters was a good chance to bid farewell to SN Chelsey Fernandez as she prepared to depart for HS “A” School.”) Now I know what everything means. Scary.

Polar Discovery (my main assignment)

Blog posts for Scientific American

Twitter – WHOI plans to use that account for other expeditions.

The photography blog Chris wrote for – learn how he got some of those photos.

home sweet home

Helen — Sat, 16 May 2009 18:16:52 +0000

I’m home! I’m home! And I’m totally jetlagged. This seemed wimpy to me, because it’s all the same country, right? I just flew home from Alaska. But then I remembered it’s almost as big a time difference as England, and I’d definitely feel justified having jetlag if I were in London right now.

There are a lot of surprises about land, but perhaps the thing I miss most about the ship is the hot water. They kept it circulating all the time, so you could go from zero to scalding in about two seconds. In my apartment, you have to run the water for about a minute to get it to warm up, and even then it’s not that hot.

land ho!

Cheryl — Tue, 12 May 2009 16:14:15 +0000

The plan was to come in Tuesday morning, but they had to end the science early for equipment reasons, so the captain decided to bring the ship in early, at 5:30 Monday. To which I, and everyone within a 420-foot radius, said: yay. My flight leaves at 1 p.m. Tuesday, and I was a little bummed about flying out immediately – everyone, coasties and science and all, goes out to the bars in Dutch Harbor during the port call. So I was glad to experience that. And *now* I am ready to fly out.

Thanks for following along with my Bering Sea adventure! Once I get home and am in charge of my own destiny/internet access, I’ll post a bunch more of my cruddy pictures. In the meantime, you can enjoy the work of a pro, my excellent colleague Chris Linder, here.