It looks like we’re headed out of the ice for good tonight. We’ve been in and out of the ice for five straight weeks, but now the boat is pointed toward Dutch Harbor. Here’s a picture of our trail:
The ice is still reasonably dense here, but we’re going south and this can’t last forever. My semi-educated guess: six more hours of ice. (It’s a little before 11 p.m. local time on Thursday.)
I’m sorry to see the ice go! It’s just so fascinating – it comes in so many shapes and forms, and it changes all the time. I don’t know if I’ll ever see it again.
Here’s another picture from that same day when I sat reading outside the bridge. It was really sunny!
The other day we stopped next to a big piece of ice for a few hours. It was a sunny day, 35 degrees and not particularly windy. The sun was on the side of the ship away from the wind, so a lot of the decks outside were really warm. I didn’t need to go on the ice that day because we were writing about some science on the ship, so I parked myself with a magazine on a high-up deck, just outside one of the doors to the bridge.
The jacket is under me because the deck was too hot to sit on comfortably, and I had to take off my sweater, too – that’s how warm it was. It was great being outside. I could smell the steak grilling for dinner. When gulls flew by, I heard them instead of just seeing them through the window. I heard the engines fire up when it was time to move on from the ice station.
They only needed to move the ship a quarter mile or so, to an open spot where they could put in the CTD, an instrument for measuring and collecting water. Normally I would’ve had to go inside when we started moving because of the wind, but the ice was so thick around there that the ship only made it about half a ship-length before it ground to a halt. The guy who was driving had to back and ram for about half an hour to get the ship a few ship lengths away. Meanwhile, I was reading about solitary confinement in the New Yorker. (Yikes.)
Finally I started worrying that the sunscreen in my lotion wasn’t going to protect me anymore and I went inside. Well, also, some fire alarm was kept going off, and I figured the people on the bridge would let me know if something was actually wrong.
I had the steak for dinner that night – it was really good.
In Friday’s dispatch there’s going to be an outstanding close-up of a McKay’s bunting taken by a photographer who knows what he’s doing. But why would you wait for that when you could have a picture by me?
The McKay’s bunting is exciting – they summer on a couple of islands in the Bering Sea, and unless you’re poking along the Alaska coast in winter, pretty much your only way to see one is to come out here. Chris the photographer and I are both attempting to rub it in with any birders we know that a McKay’s bunting is wandering around the ship today saying howdy.
Mostly it seems to like the flight deck. The flight deck is a good place to stand and watch things happening on the fantail, and Chris thinks people might drop food there. It seems to be finding something to eat, anyway. It’s also drinking from the water that collects in the helicopter tie-down bracket thingies. That water can’t be very clean, but I suppose it’s not salty – waves haven’t splashed that high, so it must be rain or melted snow.
Anyway, it’s cute, and it made the bird people happy.
I’m sorry, it’s taken me much too long to get to this. After my successful oreo inquiry, I knew had to get to the bottom of the question: how do the shipboard Ritz crackers (prepackaged in pairs, for soup-related usage) compare to the civilian Ritz I bought in Unalaska? You may recall, the shipboard oreos are smaller than regular oreos and they taste worse.
I was already pretty sure that the ship’s Ritz crackers tasted worse, and today a side-by-side taste comparison confirmed that they kind of taste like plastic. This isn’t surprising, because they live in plastic, and the ones in the box are wrapped in that nice wax-paper-y sleeve[oops - it's plastic, too. but less flavorful plastic, or something]. So the only question remaining was: are they smaller?
And here is the shocking conclusion. They aren’t smaller. On closer examination, the ship’s Ritz actually turn out to be *bigger*. I know. I was shocked.
Nilla wafers appeared in the snack bins today before lunch, but unfortunately I won’t be able to advance knowledge on that front – I didn’t bring any with me to compare them to. (My roommate suggests sending a shipwide e-mail to see if anyone brought some, but I have limits.)
The ship’s science network, which we can all get onto with our laptops, is full of many useful things. One of the most useful is the map server – you can use it to keep track of where the ship is, where it’s been, what the latest satellite imagery says about sea ice – all kinds of stuff.
For most of the cruise, we’ve been traveling in nice orderly long lines. But if you’re following along, you’ll see we’ve been checking out an algae bloom lately. Here’s what that looks like:
Like brightly-colored spaghetti, that’s what. The bright colors are interesting, actually – I have the map on my computer set to show the chlorophyll measurements being made as we go along. Yellow means more chlorophyll, blue means less. (Red would mean a lot, but no such luck.) Chlorophyll shows there’s photosynthesis going on, which means – tada – algae bloom!
More about me! I know, you just can’t get enough! The lovely people over at Smithsonian Magazine wrote a nice little blog post about what Chris the photographer and I are doing out here in the Bering Sea. Well, actually, I wrote most of it – it’s a Q&A.
Sunday’s post is about the sounds on the ship – each picture links to an associated sound. Chris suggested it because, well, we were stuck. There was no sampling on Sunday. The ship steamed northwest all day to escape a storm. The TV in the science conference lounge was, as I mentioned, on the NFL draft. I mean, seriously? Spending all day watching boys get picked for teams? Swooping the cameras around does not turn that into compelling television.
We had some ideas but they were all going to require a lot of work, on a day when most people were taking it easy. Heck, it was Saturday, and the Coast Guard celebrates the weekend, more or less. That’s why the sound post was so brilliant: Chris already had about half the sounds and we knew how to get the others, then he took some pictures of everyday objects and I wrote about them and, ta-da, we were done.
And the post turned out great. It’s a big hit on the ship and I’ve been getting nice comments from land, too. I’m proud of the posts that have explained tough science, but it’s nice that a quick little dispatch about our daily lives can work out well, too.
Of course, I also like it because I’m in one of the pictures.
Guys & Dolls is my favorite musical. It’s just so fun. It’s also the only musical I’ve ever been in. I’m catching up on old New Yorkers while I’m out here in the middle of the Bering Sea, which means I’ve read *two* pieces about Guys & Dolls recently. There’s a new production on Broadway, so someone reviewed that. In another issue, Adam Gopnik wrote about Damon Runyon (whose stories Guys & Dolls is vaguely based on). My favorite quote from the essay:
But then “Guys and Dolls” is so good that it can triumph over amateur players and high-school longueurs and could probably be a hit put on by a company of trained dolphins in checked suits with a chorus of girl penguins.
I read that quote to my roommate Liz, the bird surveyor. She said, “That would be really messy.” I think penguins poop a lot.
There are good strong laws about not getting too close to marine mammals, and hey, the Coast Guard, they’re not seal-killers. So the people on the bridge are always keeping a good watch for seals. For a grownup, they can figure it’s going to jump off the ice and swim away, but they have to steer away from the babies that are too little to swim.
Tonight there was this one grownup seal that kept not swimming away, and when it got close someone realized it was dead, and there was a gull eating it, and also we were going to run right over it. The piece of ice with the dead seal disappeared under the bow and reappeared a little later closer to the back of the ship, without the seal.
That gull was having the best day ever, right? Whole dead seal to itself. And then this giant ship comes by and knocks his dinner into the water. Imagine what that gull told its friends later. “Seriously, guys. It was THIS BIG. No, really!”
