Ken’s posterous

The boat has an interesting variety of low-tech and high-tech sensors. Perhaps the simplest is the 'ice drifter'. It is just a suitcase placed on an ice floe full of batteries that power two things: 1) A GPS receiver, and 2) A satellite phone transmitter that transmits the location. When the batteries die or the ice melts, that sensor is done. (The first versions floated after the ice melted, and ended having quite a phone bill. Current version have some holes drilled in the suitcase (Yes, liquid ocean current drifting data is useful too, but I guess the project wasn't funded for that)).
 
If you want to follow along with a high-tech sensor you can. Search for "ARGO Drifter". These little yellow drifters get put directly into the water, not on ice. They go down to a pre-programmed depth, maintain neutral buoyancy, float along, and every so often rise up to the surface and report the data they collected. Repeat for a few years. It is smart enough to detect when it is attempting to surface while under ice and waits until open water. You can watch them in realtime on the ARGO website. Let me know if you see any that we deployed.

There is nothing outside worth taking a picture of right now. Just waves, as far as the eye can see. No land, no ice, just water.
 
So I've taken a photo of my office. I imagine it looks like most offices (maybe a few more monitors than most), but my laptop is duct-taped to the desk so it doesn't slide around, and the desk chair does not have wheels, and it spins back and forth as the boat rocks.
 
We've crossed 60 degrees south while I slept last evening. I think we are leaving the Pacific and entering the Southern Ocean because the water temperature has recently dropped to around 3C from 7C.
 
For the past few days we've switched from unpacking to assembly and test. We've put together a few of the various instruments and sensor packages we want to deploy, and have started testing them bit by bit. There is a Conductivity / Temperature / Depth profiler (CTD) that gets lowered and pulled back up off the back of the boat. There are drifters which are just suitcases full of batteries to power GPS and an Iridium modem to relay the location of the drifters back home. There are deep-sea buoys we will sink to the bottom of the sea, and ice-based inverted buoys too, hanging off an ice-floe into the water below.
 
More on these later as we deploy them...
 
lat: -61.0240, lon: -86:7565
 
Note: posted out of order.

I hear from several ship-mates that some of you reading this are friends, parents, or significant others of my colleagues. I've told them they are free to write a guest-post here if they want. We're all getting along fine and doing well. I don't see most of them for more than a few hours a day because I'm one of the few on the 'night' shift.
 
One of my colleagues, Chris Little, has his own blog, and will be doing very similar work to what I do: Ocean sampling with a Rosette and a Conductivity Temperature Depth profiler (CTD). His blog is here: http://nbp-0901.blogspot.com/

It is Wednesday morning the 7th. We left the 5th, and I spent all day on the 6th lying in bed feeling nauseous. No vomiting but I couldn't spend more than 10 minutes walking around the boat before I had to lie down. Today I feel better, so far...
 
I don't have access yet to the raw pitch/roll/yaw data of the boat, but anyone with a Mac can download the free SeisMac application to help detect earthquakes. I've been running that, and can therefore record G-forces rather than tilt degrees. 1.5G is pretty high, and 0.8G make you feel pretty light (and makes it hard to open heavy doors too).
 
(lat:-55.15384, lon:-78.930428)
 
Note: Posted out of date order.

Hi Potential Blog Followers, or People Who Might Care What I'm Doing,
 
Please don't reply to this email. I won't get it. If you don't want to get emails, or this somehow makes it to the blog and you want to get it in email form (images might be email only, not on blog), let me know. You can contact me at .@nbp.usap.gov (Sorry for those of you that have gotten contact info a dozen times now).
 
It appears that the blog hasn't been working for a variety of reasons. Mail sent via the ship system gets to people but not to the blog. Plus it was off. And I think posts with pictures haven't been showing up either. And the computer was off for a while.
 
So I have a new approach I'll try: I'll be CC'ing you all (unless you request otherwise) so you get the emails directly. I'll send text emails with only text, and occasional images with no text.
 
If you prefer to follow online, posts go to (temporary site) http://mankofffoo.posterous.com/ and then should be re-posted on my site http://spacebit.org/ And if this new system works better the map should update with our location here: http://spacebit.org/maps/NBP09-01/
 
I'll be sending these via my personal Iridium demo phone which might work better than the ship email. The few posts which have shown up were sent this way which gives me hope. For your info, this text took about 4 or 5 minutes to uploading time, and about 10 minutes total to send including connections.
 
Expect a flurry of emails in the next day or two as I send out old ones that I hear have not shown up, then my goal is around one a day.
 
Current location: lat:-71.729 lon:-103.033
 
Weather: 0C, Bright sun (24h), blue water, white ice
 
Animals seen today: Penguin (Adelie, Emperor), Jellyfish, Seals, Birds

Today was a good day. We've had a few frustrating days where nothing seemed to go right, but overall the cruise has been nice, even if the instruments are confusing, the seas were rough and the weather gray. But days like today are the reason we are all here.
 
It was our first sunny day (sunny night too). There was not a cloud in the sky and the bright sun drifted lazily, West to East, over the pole all night long while I worked. The sky was bright blue, with some shades of pink around 4AM ship time (solar midnight). The snow and ice bergs were bright white. The water was a clear dark blue. The moon, almost full, hung in the sky opposite the sun, drifting East to West.
 
I woke around 9PM, ate at the midnight meal, and started work shortly after midnight, lowering a CTD and rosette sampling system 750m down, waiting for it to come back up, and then collecting samples of cold deep Antarctic water. Cold to touch, but at around 2C significantly warmer than the surface waters of -1.7C.
 
After the CTD came the best part: I got to leave the ship. We spent about two hours finding a nice stable ice floe. The crane picked us and our gear up, reached over the side, and lowered us. We were dressed for safety with hard hats and floater jackets and harnessed into the basket. We reached over the side, probing the snowpack for stable ice below. After finding it we unclipped and stepped off.
 
We spent the next hour or two digging away the snow cover, drilling holes through the ice, and taking measurements of temperature, salinity, and ice structure. We then packed up samples to take back to the ship, freeze, and analyze at a later date.
 
All the while, in the distance, some Emperor penguins paid us no attention.
 
Location: lat:-71.729, lon:-103.033

We've been at sea for a week. Every meal so far has had lettuce, avocado, and melon. Recently we had salmon and tuna.
 
This past meal we had guacamole, salmon patties, and tuna casserole. Oh well...
 
In defence of the meal, it may have been my breakfast, but it is the midnight meal, which usually is a bit less special than the 6AM, noon, or 6PM meal.

If you'd like to know how much ice we're breaking to get to the Pine Island Glacier (PIG), the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has a daily sea ice concentration map here:
 
http://www.nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/s_conc_daily.html
 
Where is the Pine Island Glacier? Around 75 South and 100 West. That is around 8 to 8:30 PM on the map above, right where there is the dip in toward the pole when moving counter clockwise.

I've met most of the people on the boat. One of them, Chris Little, has his own blog, and will be doing very similar work to what I do: Ocean sampling with a Conductivity Temperature Depth profiler (CTD). His blog is here: http://nbp-0901.blogspot.com/