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!”
Today there was a sediment trap deployment, and it was exciting and there was heavy equipment and everything was cool and all, but much more exciting: a Laysan albatross, the first albatross of the trip, kept flying by. So Chris and I were watching the albatross and agreeing, yeah, you could take a picture, but then you just have to say, “trust me, it’s really big.” And I said, you’d have to get it next to a gull (although they’re actually pretty big, too, so it wouldn’t give you the full effect).
Then, 15 minutes later, the sediment trap is out there with its giant orange buoys. And then we’re like, hey, wait, that’s the albatross sitting next to it. And then a gull lands next to it. Thanks, buddy!
Ok, my picture only has the albatross in it. But take my word for it: that’s a big bird. This actually rises above my usual wildlife pictures, which are of the “see that speck? that’s a [thing]” variety. You can actually tell this is an albatross – see that giant beak? That beak is alllll albatross.
The track for this cruise is to follow about four big long lines that go from shallow water near land out to deep water – which also means from ice to no ice. We’re heading away from mainland Alaska on one of these lines now, so we’ll probably get to the ice edge later today or overnight. So the ice kinda looks like this now:
It’s in broken pieces – the big one in this picture might be eight or 10 feet across – with little refrozen bits in between. It was really, really windy yesterday, gusting up to 50 knots (which is nautical miles per hour, and if I had a unit converter on this computer I’d tell you what that meant, but just believe me: high winds).
In the ice, it’s usually really calm, but last night there was a pretty big swell moving through the ice. It’s really wild to watch that. I’m used to thinking of the sea ice as flat and kind of like land, so when the ice is moving up and down, it’s a little disorienting. That’s probably how the ice in this picture got broken.
Today’s post is our 20th – the halfway point! As we head in and out of the ice edge, the science should change, so we’re not worried about having enough to write about. We’re more worried about forgetting to do some of the stories we’d planned.
