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.)
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.
