Ken’s posterous

As I write this we are once again in the Straits of Magellan. Land (green, not white) is visible on both sides of the ship. Some dolphins are porpoising in our wake.

Internet and solid ground and fresh vegetables await us in just a few hours. Then, ~36 hours of travel home.

Trip summary:

Science & operations: 23 days at sea. 23 CTDs. Max wave height was about 30 feet. Strongest winds were about 100 mph! Minimum air temperature (on boat) was -7.51 C, although it got quite a bit colder on the glacier. Minimum latitude: -64.99.

Pleasure: 1 Glacier hike. 1 Antarctic hot tub. 1 Zodiac ride.

Fauna: 1 Minke whale, 2 dolphins, a dozen or so seals, and one penguin colony (several hundred large, but far enough away they were just gray dots).

Dolphin, surfing the wake of the Laurence M. Gould in the Straits of Magellan.

There are a few key mantras I've learned to repeat while I'm down here:

Be Flexible. It's a Harsh Continent. Hurry Up and Wait.

We're dealing with all three of those right now.

We have left Palmer Station but have sailed South rather than North or homeward. About 40 nautical miles SSW of Palmer Station is Hugo Island. Next to Hugo is a small rock called Santa Claus Rock (I think). On this rock sits a malfunctioning weather and GPS station and we are tasked with fixing it.

Fixing it involves sending a shore party out in a Zodiac. They will attempt a landing amid breaking waves on a snow-covered rocky beach. If successful, they will then attempt to fix the weather/GPS station, and motor back to the ship. Then we sail north to port in Punta Arenas, Chile, where we catch a plane home.

Unfortunately there are strong winds, thick fog, dense sea ice, and large swells under the ice. So we are sitting and waiting. If the weather clears, the ice thins, and the waves are calm enough to land the Zodiac then perhaps we'll be able to repair the station. Otherwise we'll wait, perhaps up to 3 days, at which point we must head home due to port call deadlines. Another cruise, in a few months, will make another attempt.

The weather component measures the... weather. And the GPS component is measuring continental rebound. During the last ice age there was a lot more ice here. This ice weighed a lot and pushed the crust of the earth down. The ice left relatively quickly, but the crustal rebound continues today. This process will continue in the future as more ice melts, and seas rise, due to both natural and human-induced climate change. A side-effect of this is that over long periods of time, certain places might experience relative sea-level drop rather than rise, although they are likely to get wet over the short term.

Pancake Ice on Waves, Drake Passage, Antarctica.
(61 29.95S, 62 24.68W)

Yesterday I spent an hour in a different world. I've seen sights in Antarctica before that I thought were foreign, but nothing like this. This was the birth of sea ice, and even the veteran captain of the ship had never seen anything like it before.

I call it Phosphorescing Pancake Ice. I think the technical term would be Pancake Ice mixed with Slush, and it coated the surface of the sea as far as one could see.

We've been trained through experiences to expect large bodies of water to behave a certain way. Few of us have been unlucky, odd, or lucky enough to observe large bodies of liquid other than pure water under normal g forces. The few us that have helped clean up an oil spill, worked in an industrial Jello(TM)(R) plant, day-dreamed of oceans on Mars, or sailed the seas of Antarctic might understand what we saw yesterday.

The waves rolled past us. But something was different. They were both too tall and too low and wide, at the same time, for themselves. They appeared to move in slow motion. There were no small ripples on the surface of these giant swells. They were completely smooth. The pancake-pattern coating of ice made the surface look like the body of a giant white leopard flexing its muscles underneath us.

This much is common, when sea ice is born. But our seas had just the right amount of slush so that each wave glowed or flashed as the peak moved slowly by us. I think the water was draining from the peak of each wave so that the slush flashed a pure snow-white as opposed to a wet gray on the face and trough.

We captured HD video of it but I cannot post it from the boat. I think there will be plenty of images or movies of "Pancake Ice" if you search the interweb. Combine one of these images with an image of "Phosphorescence Sea Waves" to get graphic of what I describe above.

My brother made an excellent point that an EMP is not the only event that could take out a ship full of GPSs. A solar storm (it would have to be one much larger than anything on record) could take out multiple satellites.

I once studied the "Bastille Day Geo magnetic Storm" when I worked on upper-atmosphere physics and Sun-Earth interactions at the Laboratory for Atmosphere and Space Physics. An anecdote about this storm is that on Bastille day the British and French fly homing pigeons across the English Channel. These birds navigate, as many animals do, using the magnetic field lines of Earth. Very few of the birds arrived at their destination the year of the severe storm.

I therefore presume a large storm could take out both satellites and compasses, leaving us fully dependent on a sextant.

This is my first post-via-email so I'm not sure if it will work. I'm not sure if my blog is even running right now...
 
I have a question from a student: "Is there a sextant on the ship in case other navigational instruments fail? If so, could you take a picture of it?"
 
A photo is attached. The answer about using it involved a lengthy conversation. The First Mate said that they keep it for show-and-tell, and that if the navigational instruments ever failed there would be a lot more to worry about than navigating with a sextant. This is because we have several dozen GPS instruments on the bridge alone. If all of them or all the satellites that provide the location information were to fail, something else is very wrong with the ship and the world.
 
In my opinion, all of these failing is unlikely but still possible. One nuclear weapon detonated in the atmosphere anywhere nearby would create an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) which would permanently turn of all electronic devices within range. Unfortunately we live in a world where this is becoming a realistic possibility. Fortunately our ship, located in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica, would probably not be within the target range.
 
In addition to the above, a sextant requires a) a horizon and b) an object that can be tracked. For the past 2 days we have lived in a black-and-white world. The ship is bright orange, but everything else is a subdued gray. Thick clouds blanket the sky and we cannot easily detect where the sun is, nor where the sky ends and the sea begins.
 
Therefore, should GPS fail, we would resort to Dead Reckoning. This technique requires your current position to be known, and a compass. (A compass would survive an EMP.) We would point in the direction we want to go, put the engines to a certain speed of X knots (X nautical miles per hour), and then we would just drive in that direction. This technique does not take into account drift due to ocean and air currents.
 
One of the other mates told me that until 5 years ago all ships were required to carry a sextant. That is no longer the case, and some maritime schools are considering dropping sextant lessons from their curriculum. There exists a generational gap where many older captains require a sextant on board and younger captains my not even know how to use it, or learned out of an appreciation of an historical science, as opposed to a job requirement.
 
I hope this answers your question.
 
  -k.

I seem to be having some website troubles... Such is the case when you host and admin your own server in a basement three continents away.

 However, if you can read this, then you can work around any troubles that I might have. I'm posting to http://spacebit.org by emailing things to http://mankofffoo.posterous.com/ This means you can follow along there rather than on SpaceBit. I'd prefer you use SpaceBit (if it is online) as SpaceBit will exist after the cruise while Posterous is temporary.

   -k.

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