We made another effort at reaching the ice edge last night, but things have gotten a little odd out there. About 500 meters short of the ice edge we encountered some of the whaling crew hanging out around a 2 foot wide crack in the ice. They’d been watching the crack for some time, trying to gauge it’s progress. These cracks are really significant, and can signal that a large piece of the pack ice is getting ready to head out to sea (the opposite of the rafting phenomenon that we observed on Tuesday). Normally these cracks start to form when the wind kicks up, but there was no wind yesterday. The hunters speculated that the current alone was starting to move the ice around. During this exchange we spotted a polar bear moving parallel to the ice edge (the second we’ve seen in two days of sampling).
That is in fact a polar bear. All my polar bear pictures are some variation on this theme, I’m not sure how the people at National Geographic do it…
There was a quick discussion about whether we wanted to proceed across the crack and onto the potentially mobile flow, but my bear guard* and I were both curious about what was happening at the ice edge itself. We dropped a radio with the hunting party and asked them to call us if the crack moved, rigged a measuring bar for the crack, and proceeded cautiously. Within 200 meters we entered an entire network of cracks and realized there was no way to proceed. We turned back to do what sampling we could at the new crack, which at least afforded an opportunity to collect seawater.
The third crack we encountered. Clearly the ice is on the move, and we are not going to reach the ice edge today!
I spent most of the day in the lab today, processing all the samples collected over the last two days. A few hours ago the Icy Worlds team from JPL rolled in, and I’ll be helping them for the rest of the trip. Their project is focused on the methane rich lakes that dot the tundra here (a good analogue for Europa), an environment that I have not explored yet. I’m looking forward to it!
*In Antarctica the safety personnel request not to be named in photos, blog entries, Facebook posts, etc. They are stuck between the rock of rigid restrictions and the hard place of scientists wanting to meet an objective, and at times are willing to bend in favor of science. Since this can involve a creative interpretation of the rules, it’s better not to call them out. Although this is much less of an issue in the Arctic I’m keeping this as a general policy.
