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.
Loyal readers may recall my shipboard foray into oreo science two years ago, in which I learned that the ship’s mini-pack oreos were way smaller than the regular oreos I’d bought on shore. A follow-up experiment with Ritz crackers showed that the ship’s crackers were bigger – but, like the ship’s oreos, tasted worse – than the ones I’d brought with me.
My mom contributed to the spread of snack food science by bringing back a packet of oreos from Spain this fall. In the interests of science, I had to buy oreos at CVS – and then not eat them all before I got around to making a comparison. (Curse those tasty cookies.)
On the left, the American oreo; on the right, the Spanish one.
It’s easier to tell in person, but the American one is definitely bigger, although it’s not as big a size difference as ship vs shore oreos. The American one is also a slightly lighter shade of brown. The Spanish ones are a bit more squished, but that could be because the packet sunbathed in my kitchen for a couple of months before I got around to opening it for this experiment. And the American ones taste better. That’s probably thanks to some ingredient that the EU doesn’t allow.
Here’s a side view where you can see the difference in height:
And there you go. Oreo science.
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.
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.
Check it out: I wrote about ice in the Bering Sea for the website of Deadliest Catch, the Discovery Channel show about crab fishing in the Bering Sea. There’s been a lot more ice than usual the last couple of years, which is weird, what with the whole global warming thing. I explained why for the benefit of the show’s fans.
In other Deadliest Catch news, check out this awesome knitting pattern for a crab, inspired by the show.
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.
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.
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.
As the scientist standing at the window next to me said a few minutes ago: “They wouldn’t show *this* on Deadliest Catch, would they?” The Bering Sea is absolutely dead calm. It looks like a pond, only flatter.
You can see a whale surface a mile away, because there is nothing between here and there. I’ve only seen two whales, a pair of humpbacks after lunch, but other people have seen minke whales and a fin whale today. I also saw some Steller’s sea lions swimming in the distance and a whole bunch of far-off harbor porpoises, and I have high hopes for orcas. I mean, what I *want* is humpbacks leaping over the bow, but I’ll take orcas.
I was interviewing a scientist when Chris got the page about the humpbacks and I dragged her up to the bridge with me to see what was going on. It worked out well, that bit of multi-tasking – we saw whales and I learned some basic physical oceanography, all at the same time.
We’re out of the ice for the last time. We’ll be back in port on Tuesday.
Here’s how you know you’re on a ship:
All the computers are tied down. I don’t think we’ve actually had any boat movement that would be dramatic enough to slide a laptop off a table, but I’m glad they’re tied down anyway. This is one of the public laptops with internet. Instruments in the lab are tied down, too. Also, a lot of work surfaces have some kind of sticky, rubbery mesh material stretched over them and stapled down, so you can set things down and be pretty sure they won’t slide away.
I was worried about seasickness before I came on board, but here’s the result: I never had any. Well, I never got nauseous. For one thing, the ship just didn’t move that much. In the ice, it mostly kind of bounces around – not the steady movement that makes you sick – and we were in the ice for the vast majority of the trip. When we did get into open water with some swells, all it did was make me a bit sleepy. We’re back in open water now, but the big, scary, stormy Bering Sea is doing its best impression of a pond.
I did get land-sick early in the trip – I’d feel dizzy when we stopped all day at the ice. I’m kind of dreading being really back on land. A science writer friend of mine who used to be an oceanographer told me he was always land-sick for three times as long as he was on the boat, which would put me into early August. Yikes. Let’s hope I’m not like him. (Well, other than his wild success as a freelancer.)
