I fought the ice and the ice won? Had a long, good day on the ice yesterday (and yes, it was quite hot). There was a little chaos at the start, as there always is. Barrow depends in no small part on hunting bowhead whales for food. In addition to being an important cultural touchstone it’s a lot more economical (and ecologically friendly) than shipping in protein from southern Alaska or the lower 48. Whaling is possible in Barrow because the bowhead whales follow the circumpolar flaw lead that exists all around the periphery of the Arctic Ocean, at the interface between the landfast ice and pack ice. The Barrow polynya is part of this flaw lead system – and the place I hope to sample young sea ice, frost flowers, and seawater. Reaching the polynya, for scientists and for hunters, is not straightforward. In a bad year several miles of extremely jumbled, broken, and sometimes shifting landfast ice has to be crossed to get there. To enable hunting the whaling crews start cutting trails to the lead edge in March. The whaling captains are fiercely territorial about the trails – many of their dollars (the whaling captains are generally businessmen and civic leaders) and many hours go in to building them.
Last week it looked like there was an unused trail at the north end of the polynya that we might be able to use. This is far from the normal whaling area, and therefore our presence would have a minimal impact on whaling activity. At the last minute however, one of the whaling crews decided to abandon their old site and occupy this trail. At first it wasn’t clear which whaling crew had made this move, and it looked for a while like this field effort might be dead on arrival. As fate would have it however, it turned out to be the crew to which the bear guard tasked to our project belonged, moreover his dad was the crew’s captain. The trail wasn’t quite finished yet, but the word was that they would reach the ice edge within a few hours. If we helped them break trail they would probably look favorably on a little science work at the ice edge. Time to break some ice.
Cutting a “pass” through one of many pressure ridges.
The basic idea with trail building is to create little passes through the pressure ridges (often 10-15 feet high) big enough for a snowmachine pulling a whaling boat (a hide boat perhaps 15 feet long and 5 feet wide). Ice is a really satisfying medium for this kind of construction: the boulders give enough resistance to make you want to work at them, but progress is quick and visible. After three hours on the chain gang we could see the lead edge from the top of the pressure ridge. The whaling crew stopped for lunch and suggested we go on ahead and sample. With a little trial and error we reached the lead edge and got to work. There were plenty of frost flowers, though they were melting a bit under warm temps, so we made plans to visit the site again later that night when it was cooler.
The lead edge. We sampled on the small fracture in the foreground, the larger lead in the background is also covered in frost flowers.
I should know by now that nothing stays the same at the lead edge over a period of even a few hours. When we returned to the edge around 9pm we found that the wind had shifted, “rafting” the young sea ice that we had previously sampled and covering any open water. With the sun low on the horizon it was a beautiful site, but bad for forming new frost flowers and for whaling. We stayed at the lead edge for a few hours, taking pictures and sampling some of the remaining frost flowers.
Know your subject. Getting up close and personal with some frost flowers.
The lead edge after the wind shifted. Plenty of frost flowers, but now they’re high and dry on top of rafted ice floes.
Today I’m in the lab, prepping yesterday’s samples and getting ready to head back out tonight (after a heavy dose of ibuprofen). Conditions don’t look good. The wind hasn’t changed direction and, even worse, a light snow is falling. We will head out anyway and see what we find. You never can tell!
