Helen FieldsScience Writer

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!