Arctic Sunrise

(Posted by Melanie, campaigner on board the Arctic Sunrise:)
 
I spend waaaaay too much time in the office of this ship chained to my
laptop, but sometimes sitting here in the office of the Arctic Sunrise
has its benefits.
 
Take two minutes ago when Arne Sorensen, our ice pilot, came into the
office. Arne's job is to maneuver the ship through ice, which may sound
simple, but trust me, it's not. It takes an intimate knowledge of and
experience with wind, weather, the ship's abilities and the many states
and behavior of the ice itself to chart a safe course from point A to
point B. Just as importantly, Arne can use his decades long experience
piloting ships in polar conditions to predict in advance and avoid any
hazards that could trap, slow or jeopardize the wellbeing of the ship.
 
The ship is too far north to have a connection to the internet, so Arne
has arranged for Willem Beekman in the Greenpeace office in Washington,
DC to download and then send via email daily weather charts from the
Canadian weather service. (You can see the site at
http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/marine/index_e.html) The charts cover
North America and Greenland, with curved lines and circles called
isobars that show equal lines of barometric pressure across the region.
Isobars outline high and low pressure systems, which in turn generate
wind and weather. Wind and weather affect not only the sea ice, they are
also major forces in the impending break up of the Robeson Channel ice
bridge at 82 degrees north that we visited on June 29, as well as the
disintegration of the Petermann Glacier floating ice tongue that we are
here to document. Arne can look at the daily weather charts, and along
with satellite imagery that he's also having sent to the ship, get a
sense for when the ice bridge will break and the glacier will disintegrate.
 
The information on the Canadian weather service charts comes from
sources around the world. Since leaving Amsterdam on June 12, the Arctic
Sunrise has been uploading weather information every six hours to the
Dutch meteorological service. The information we provide is then fed
into a computer network, which connects all major weather service
agencies around the world.
 
At any rate, Arne clicked to open today's Canadian weather service chart
and noticed that the weather information the Arctic Sunrise is providing
appears on the chart. Our little dot on the Canadian weather service
chart is identified as "PE6851". Why is this cool? Well, without us the
information would not be on the charts. This is such a remote place,
it's unique to have a ship here at this time of year providing data. And
given ice records for Nares Strait only go back 32 years, having a
handle on the ice and weather conditions in this area is a fairly new
occurrence. Last, and perhaps this is completely juvenile, I always get
a charge out of looking at a map and pinpointing our location. Given our
chances were 50/50 of even reaching this place, I was trying to temper
my optimism in case ice blocked our way.
 
In keeping with the luck we've had so far with weather, wind and ice,
Arne's report from today's ice chart is good – no dramatic weather in
our near future. That's a good thing given all of the scientific work
Dr. Jason Box and his team have planned for Petermann Glacier and the
fjord it drains into.
 
- Melanie

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"We thought we were alone in the world"
 
So a Polar Inuit hunter is said to have told South Greenlander John Sacheuse, official interpreter on 1818 expedition to Greenland led by Captain John Ross. Or so the story goes – some have questioned the accuracy of Sacheuse’s translation of the man’s statement, so different were their dialects. The most northern society in the world had been cut off from everyone south of them for hundreds, or thousands of years, so they could be forgiven for feeling "alone".
 
Whatever the truth behind that quote, the crew of the Arctic Sunrise can empathise with its essence. If it wasn’t for our dripfeed of emails and the occasional phone call on our Iridium satellite phone, the rest of the world’s population might as well not exist.
 
Remember those old movies, pre-Jurassic Park, about lands that time forgot, or valleys of dinosaurs, or however many years BC? For every movie based on the works of Jules Verne or HG Wells, then a dozen B-Movies shamelessly ransacked them and the hired actor Doug McClure as the 'hero'.
 
Petermann Fjord has that feeling of being outside time. A mammoth or some sabre-toothed beast might appear in silhouette on the1000m high limestone cliffs that flank each side of the 16km wide tongue of Petermann Glacier – the floating mass of ice that stretches 80km back towards Greenland's ice cap. The scarred cliffs, carved out when the glacier was larger, and higher in some distant past – give the place a prehistoric feel.
 
We do have neighbours: curious seals, who surface occasionally to check out the ship, ivory gulls, arctic terns, and the noisy little black guillemots (actually a kind of auk, the northern hemisphere's answer to the penguin). Richard said he saw a pintail today, and possibly a skua. No more polar bears, yet.
 
A couple of 'nights' ago – we're so far north here that it doesn't get dark - I was out on deck, with Captain Pete, science dude Jason, photographer Nick and "super ice-guy" Eric. All of us stood there in silence for a little while, soaking up the warm sunshine and the reflections of the tributary glaciers pouring into the still waters of Petermann Fjord. That might not be everyone's idea of a perfect Friday night, but I would guess that many of the crew of the Arctic Sunrise – especially those mentioned above, are least comfortable, if not at their happiest when they're out in the big, wide, open wild places.
 
The silence was finally broken by Eric joking that he "really missed Melbourne traffic". This, after all, a man who has skied to the North and South Poles. Stephen, our motion-picture maestro has just shot a short movie with Eric, which you can find on the CNN website: http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2009/news/environment
 
The Arctic Sunrise has spent much of the last few days parked right up against the front of Petermann Glacier. At first glance, it might seem to lack the drama of other glaciers – the deck of the ship is higher than the Petermann's freeboard and another 50m or so is hidden below the water. It's hard to believe, standing on deck, that the glacier could be 16km wide – so hard is to just scale here, that the opposing cliffs seem no more than half that distance apart. However, the air is clear and dry here. Things look closer than we're used to seeing them.
 
 From above, however, Petermann Glacier is a mindblowing sight. Intensely blue lakes and melt streams burn through the undulating white ice, while massive cracks run riot across the glacier. Two of our scientists, Jason and Alun, reckon that the glacier's major cracks have widened since our arrival in the area a week ago, and that even the difference between one day and the next is noticeable.
 
All predictions are leading to one big event – sometime in the coming weeks, a massive piece of Petermann's tongue, 100 square kilometres in size will break and float away.
 
Last year, 37 square kilometres of ice escaped. It's become known as the "Petermann Ice Island", and is still prowling around Baffin Bay, monitored carefully by Canadian authorities. When this new ice island escapes, and slips out to sea, it means that more of the 'grounded' or land-based part of the glacier could slip into the sea water and become part of the floating tongue. This has implications for both global sea level rise, as well for the Greenland ice sheet itself, best explained by the 'champagne cork' analogy– if the deterioration of Greenland's glaciers continue, it could open the way for a potentially larger release of more frozen fresh water, from the vast ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, into the ocean – thereby contributing to a major rise in sea levels.
 
In the past week, we've been busy putting diagnostic intruments in place that will help the three scientists on board – Jason, Alun and Richard – understand more about the multitude of climatic and other factors that are causing Petermann's disintegration. A battery of high resolution time-lapse cameras now line the cliffs over Petermann; several more are sitting on the ice itself, helping to give accurate records of the iceflow. Footage from these cameras retrieved today back up the casual observations we've been making by eye – yes, the cracks are widening – the ice could break at any time.
 
Sensitive GPS units are now sitting on the areas of ice that could break off, what we call A, the 100 sq km piece, as well as two more areas, known as B and C. Piece A, it seems, is hanging by a thread, and the collection of data being collected by the various threads will not only pinpoint the conditions present at the moment of the glacier's collapse, but will draw an in-depth picture of factors situation that led to it.
 
The Arctic Sunrise is going to spend the next few weeks here, unless, of course, the barrier holding back the Arctic Ocean's sea ice breaks, flooding the Nares Strait with floes, forcing us to take evasive action. We'll be here waiting, watching, recording and exploring. We may feel a million miles away from the rest of the world, but we'll be telling the story of our lifestyles can have a direct effect on Greenland's ice cap and glaciers – and how changes in Greenland can have reverberations around the world.
 
- Dave

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From Melanie, campaigner on board the Arctic Sunrise:
A few hours after arriving at 82.31 degrees north latitude, a polar bear was sighted wandering not too far off the ship’s port beam. As you can imagine when someone shouts out “polar bear!” a fair bit of mayhem ensues, we drop what we are doing, grab our cameras and run out on deck. My cabin mate, Faye, is on watch from 12-4 so she was asleep, but she’d given me explicit instructions to wake her if a polar bear was sighted. I crossed my fingers and hoped the polar bear would remain in sight for at least a few minutes more while I ran down below to wake Faye.
 
The first polar bear I ever saw was off the coast of Alaska in the Beaufort Sea in 1998. I’ve been lucky enough to see dozens more in subsequent trips to the Arctic. I will never, ever tire of seeing them in the wild. To me, they are the most amazing creatures on the planet.
The more I read about them, the more I am in awe of the unique way they’ve evolved from brown bears on land to marine mammals that live in the Arctic, from the way they hunt and travel to the way they regulate their body temperature. They are astonishing creatures.
What struck me yesterday is how gracefully polar bears move. We were lucky enough to have this three-year old bear meander along the ice edge just 20 feet (6m) or so from the ship for a good half hour while we all gawked and took hundreds, if not thousands of pictures. I kept snapping pictures as the polar bear walked, stopped and sat up, crouched down and sniffed the water, scooped up snow into its mouth as it ambled along, even bared its teeth at us. Every picture shows a graceful creature; none of the images show the bear off balance or looking awkward. Imagine doing that with a person walking along on uneven sea ice – you know you’d get a lot of images of the person looking awkward as they righted themselves and caught their balance.
 
I’m no polar bear expert but this bear looked fat and healthy, I could see the fat around its back half jiggle like ‘jello’ as it walked. Bears keep warm with a thick layer of blubber, and they depend on their blubber for periods when they can’t hunt, so a fat bear is a healthy, thriving bear. I have seen skinny bears with their ribs showing and it’s tough to watch.
 
As Dave wrote yesterday, one of the reasons we took the ship north to 82.31 degrees north latitude was to allow Arne Sorensen, our ice pilot, to get a first-hand look at the ice bridge that separates ice free Nares Strait from the multi-year, thick pack ice of the Arctic Ocean north of the ice bridge.
 
Once the ice bridge breaks, all of the multi-year ice will flow south into Nares Strait and potentially pose serious navigation hazards to the ship. After Arne had done his reconnaissance flight of the ice bridge, I was told to suit up quickly for a heli trip to see the sea ice myself.
This was a real treat, I am pretty passionate about sea ice and the Arctic environment and will jump at any chance to go to high latitudes for a fix.
 
At any rate, the point I want to mention is that I have never seen so many polar bear tracks in the sea ice. I’ve seen polar tracks before, but usually just one set, and days and months can go by between sightings. The sea ice I saw yesterday was literally cross-hatched with polar bear tracks where bears have wandered along the ice edge, then veered off to check out seal breathing holes and haul out zones in the ice, then around pressure ridges and then zig-zagging back to the ice edge again. It was no surprise that I also saw dozens of seals in the short flight, including the site of a recent successful hunt where a seal skeleton and skin were all that remained from a polar bear’s meal.
Seals are the primary prey of polar bears. Where you find seals, you find polar bears. I hope we see more polar bears in the next three months of this expedition, but if not, then I will be happy with yesterday’s morning visitor to the ship.
 
- Melanie
 
Photo: Greenpeace/Nick Cobbing

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The crew of the Arctic Sunrise is on top of the world today, for many mindblowing reasons. As I write this, the ship is nudged up against the sea ice of the Arctic Ocean at 82.5 north – a latitude higher than any Greenpeace ship has achieved before, as far as we know. A couple of hours after we arrived, and had barely finished breakfast, a young polar bear loped past, seemingly curious and indignant about us unfurry humans gawping at it from our inedible green ship. It had been prowling along the ice edge, looking for seals for breakfast. We later saw evidence that it may have been successful, but I’ll spare squeamish readers the details. After such a short time here, it’s incredible that we’ve seen one of the world’s most formidable animals, one that is at risk from the lost of sea ice caused by climate change.
 
Where are we anyway? To the west, in the distance are mountains in the north of Ellesmere Island, and we can just about see the Canadian base at Alert. To the east, the mountains Greenland’s top end lie on the horizon. To the south, Nares Strait – the route to Baffin Bay by which we arrived, and to the north – well, there’s really only frozen ocean between here and the geographic North Pole. Earlier – with lookouts keeping an eye for polar bears, most of the crew jumped out onto the ice, taking a very short stroll around on the Arctic Ocean, before Nick had us clowning for a crew photograph – with Captain Pete holding a sign that reads “North Pole: 445 miles”.
 
What are we doing here? In my last blog entry from the Arctic Sunrise, we had just departed Sisimiut, after picking up some team members. We sailed through Baffin Bay, while Jason, the climatologist on board, and heli pilot Martin leapfrogged to check on time-lapse cameras that had been set up along Greenland’s west coast two years ago, taking high resolution, hourly images of the glacier movement. I’ve seen some of this footage, and it’s compelling viewing – we hope to get some of it online in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
 
The Arctic Sunrise then entered the Nares Strait, the body of water that divides northwest Greenland from Canada’s Ellesmere Island. On our way to Nares, we’d been warned that our chances of getting through were about 50/50 – the route is usually choked with sea ice well into the summer, with most icebreakers only making the passage in August. I expected to fall asleep at night listening to ice clunking and grazing along the hull of the ship.
 
It wasn’t to be, however – we encountered no ice worth talking about. For reasons that are unclear – but may be related to warming sea temperatures and high winds – the sea ice in Nares Strait never ‘consolidated’ last winter, for the first in 32 years of records. This means that the ice never really properly fused together, and remained thin. The last time there was any proper sea ice Nares Strait was March 2008. While we can’t say what exactly is causing this – we can certainly say that it’s evidence of a climate is changing.
 
Usually at the bottom end of Nares Strait there’s what known as an ‘ice bridge’, at Smith Sound. Now this doesn’t look an crystalline Golden Gate or Sydney Harbour bridge, it’s a term to describe an arc-like formation of ‘old’ ice that holds sea ice in place, creating a body of open water, called a polynya. There was no ice bridge at Smith Sound from last winter – so it was plain sailing for the Arctic Sunrise and its ice pilot, Arne. We’ve been joking with him that his life as been made easy – instead of spending the last few days crunching through sea ice, we didn’t encounter any significant amount until we reached Robeson Channel, 450km north of where the first ice bridge should be. That’s where we’re sitting right now and it’s where we met our polar bear this morning, right at the Robeson ice bridge.
 
A few hours sail back down the Nares Strait is Petermann Glacier – which we stopped off at for a while yesterday, before mounting a recce mission to survey the sea ice. With the ice bridge due to crack up at any time, we wanted to check its state and estimate when it might break – lots of sea ice being blowing down the Nares Strait will make life a little tricky in the coming weeks, as we carry out our mission at Petermann Glacier – which includes observing the expected disintegration of some of the glacier, as well as carrying scientific research with our team of scientists.
 
The sheer size of a glacier like Petermann is something that many on board the Arctic Sunrise haven’t yet got our heads around. Martin flew across the glacier yesterday, and was stunned that after six minutes, he was still crossing it – it’s 16km wide! The piece of ice that is expected to break off in the coming weeks is a whopping 100 square kilometres. A photograph taken by Nick yesterday shows Jason and our ‘super ice guy’ Eric setting up a time-lapse camera on the glacier itself. Shot from a helicopter, the two men look like tiny ants on a surreal, alien landscape, mottled with azure blue melt pools. We’re heading back towards Petermann tonight, and in the coming weeks will be telling you lots more about our adeventures there.
 
Note: If you read this blog, and there’s only one image on it, please check back later – hopefully my land-based colleague, Julliette, can add more images. On top of the world as we are, our Internet connection is quite tiny! Photographs © Greenpeace/Nick Cobbing
 
- Dave

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The Arctic Sunrise made it to the ice edge too easily - we’re now at 81.5 degrees north! A polar bear stopped by the ship this morning…

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