Various photos of the work that went on.

I was sent to work on this cruise because my boss is one of the lead investigators in this project. He is collaborating with NOAA. My job was to assist folks from NOAA collect water samples and sea-ice samples. Here are some photos of that work and other’s.

Out in the ocean, water samples are typically taken with what is called a CTD. This apparatus can vary in size. The one on the Healy is of the upper size. It typically has Niskin bottles in a rosette configuration. We had 12, 30-liter Niskin bottles. The bottles collect water at different depths. When the CTD is lowered, the top and bottom caps of the Niskin bottles are cocked back to allow water to flow thru them as the CTD is lowered. The cable that lowers the CTD has a cable inside of it that supplies power and transfers data from sensors on the CTD. These sensors detect Conductivity (salinity) and Temperature at Depth, thus the acronym, CTD. The CTD is lowered thru the water column to the bottom. As it is lowered the scientists can view, in real time, what the water column looks like in terms of temperature and salinity and determine what depths they would like to take water samples.

As the CTD is brought back to the surface, the Niskin bottles are “fired” meaning a trigger releases the cables holding back the caps and the bottle retains the water at the depth it was fired.

Here the CTD is about to be lowered into the water. You can see the top caps of the Niskins cocked back in the open position.

The CTD back in the CTD room and water being collected.

The NOAA folks and myself were collecting water for several analysis; nutrients, chlorophyll, dissolved oxygen and oxygen 18.
What you see here is the collection method for nutrients. Each bottle that was fired was collected from.

Each syringe-full of water had to be squeezed thru a filter. And that’s right, you see us using a powered caulk gun to make the filtering easier! I had never seen a powered caulk gun before. Pretty cool.

Here you see a filtering apparatus for taking chlorophyll samples. We would fill up bottles from the Niskin bottles and them bring them here and run the water thru either one filter (to measure total chlorophyll) or two filters (where the chlorophyll from both filters are added up and compared to the chlorophyll from the one filter(total) to see if the numbers equal each other. If not then you may have something wrong with your filtering system/methods. The water is poured into the cups and a vacuum pump pulls the water thru the filters to speed up the process.

The tedious job of folding up the filters. Each filter is put in its own little test tube and then into a -80 F freezer to be kept frozen until it can be brought back to the lab in Seattle where the sample will be processed.

On 9 different days we got out onto the sea-ice to take ice-core samples. It typically took us only about 2 hours to complete the job. There were other scientists that took up to 6 hours to complete their work so we were in no hurry.
We had to wear dry suits, per the Coast Guard’s requirements. It was a bit of over-kill. Mustangs, much less cumbersome to put on and plenty warm, would have worked just fine.
The dry suits worked like a clam shell to get into.

Ready to tackle the ice!

Our gear out on the ice.

Helping Jeremy with the ice-corer. The bottom of the ice-corer has two small teeth to cut the ice. The core runs up inside of the hollow tube of the corer. Once the corer punches thru the bottom of the ice, two small dogs (arms) flip out to keep the core from falling out the bottom of the corer as you haul it up.

Dave with the ice corer nearly maxed out. If the ice was thicker than the coring tube you had to break the core and take it out, then add an extension bar to the core tube and go down again, filling up the core tube. This happened only once. Normally the ice were were sampling was between 25 and 90 cm or about 1 foot to 3 feet.

An ice-core on the cutting board. The dark band in the middle of the core is either algae that grew when the bottom of the ice was at that thickness or it is mud/silt from when the ice may have been near the shore and scraped the bottom. You can see a small amount of algae at the bottom of the core.

Cutting up core to take back onto the ship. Once the core was taken and placed on the board, a picture would be taken, the total length recorded and then a hole would be drilled at every 10 cm, starting at 5 cm to the center of the core to take the temperature of the ice. We would cut the core into 10 cm pieces. We took two full cores. Sections from one core would be melted and sampled for chlorophyll. Sections from the other core would be sampled for salinity and nutrients.

The ice floe after a day’s work. While we were on the ice, the Coast Guard would have a guy out there with a shot gun serving as our Polar Bear watch. No bears were sighted on this trip. Another guy would be in a dry diving suit. His job was to jump in and save one of us if we were to somehow get ourselves in the water. The water was 28 F.

A miniature Alvin! One of the researchers had this little ROV that took video. He would deploy it from holes in the ice and film krill feeding off the algae on the bottom of the ice. The ROV was operated from right on the ice. The video monitor and joy stick were all housed in a small plastic case. Very cool.

Down it goes.

At nearly each station this Van Veen Grab would be lowered to the ocean bottom to take a grab sample of whatever it happened upon.

Full Van Veen Grab

The following pictures are critters that came up. Don’t ask me what they are! Some worms of some kind. A kind of sea-star or sea-spider. Some clams, etc.

Some folks were interested in the mud on the sea bottom. This is a multi-core. The apparatus is lowered with a cable. When its legs touch the bottom, the heavy weights in the center of the device push the hollow plastic tubes into the mud. When the multi-core is brought back up, arms on the tubes swing down and keep the mud from sliding out the bottom.

One of several types of nets that were deployed over the back of the ship to capture little critters that are in the water column. At the bottom of the net is a small canister to hold the critters. Holes are in it with mesh to allow the water to pass thru.

Types of worms and a critter that I've not been able to find a name for. I've seen video of it and it is so beautiful. The lines in the body have little "lights" that move and glow. I've been told it is not a chemical reaction but a physical process of reflecting light. Sorry I don' have more info. on it.

These are Euphausiids or krill. They were found feeding on algae on the bottom of the sea-ice. It is these little guys that baleen whales eat. There are several different species that grow larger than these little (1 cm) guys.

The Board of Lies. This board was used to diseminate information to everyone onboard. It was constantly changing, thus the name. You could never be sure about what was going to happen next. As you can see there was much going on at times. A camera monitored this board and the image could be seen on the intranet website aboard the ship. Computers thruout the ship could be used to know what was going on or going to happen.

Some photos of the lab space onboard.