The Coming Of Winter

The last couple weeks have been a wintry blur of applications, snow, boring labwork, boring computer exercises, and beautiful auroras. The last blog entry I had was at the end of the cruise, and I apologize that I haven't updated more recently.

The Saturday after we returned from our cruise, the annual Kitchen to Kitchen party was held. Each kitchen that signed up decorated based on a theme and then the partygoers went from kitchen to kitchen partying in each for around an hour. As part of the party-planning committee, I was involved with the set-up and preparation for the event. My kitchen was doing a Tropical Paradise theme, which was a fun idea, but difficult to pull off in the northernmost town in the world. We made paper palm trees and turned the sterile fluorescent lights into warm suns. It looked really welcoming and even now, three weeks later, we have kept the decorations up. We also bought three pineapples and turned them into punch and hats. The party was initially fun, I was happy to see that the hard work over the past weeks was being enjoyed by my classmates. But then a large group of very tall, very drunk Dutch men arrived, all wearing capes and in general being disruptive. I guess I'm glad they were having a good time, but by the time it was time to go to my tropical kitchen, they had started lifting girls and throwing them over their shoulders, chanting "Yes! Yes! No!" whenever there was a break in the music, and in general just being destructive. They kept trying to change my tropical dance remix playlist to something else. I had to take a break after that, sitting in my room and eating snacks. As I was a member of the party committee, I had to help vote for best kitchen. We chose the "Cloud Kitchen" for their impressive decorations and themed blue and white shots, though to be honest, everyone was so tired that the decision was not deliberated on for very long. We spent half an hour running around Nybyen from building to building as snow fell around us.  Being in a tropical themed t-shirt and shorts made me one cold partygoer. We finally found some people from that kitchen and I was able to sleep. The next day, I learned that one of the tables had been broken.

I decided to re-visit Santa Claus Mine that day and found that there was an entire wing of the mine that I hadn't even seen, and, with my headlamp, I was able to explore much more.

The following week was not particularly interesting, but I enjoyed the nightly auroras. On Monday, I was startled to hear joyful whooping of "Aurora!" echoing through the hallway of the dorm. I threw on my jacket and boots and ran outside. In the sky a green glow was pouring across the sky in thin ribbons. There was a liquidness to the movement that I didn't expect, and the faintness of the light was a surprise. Being above the auroral oval, the oval that marks the maximum aurora brightness, the northern lights over Svalbard are actually not as brilliant as those further south. Long exposure cameras make the aurora seem brighter than it really is as well. But it was still a miraculous sight. I now check the aurora forecast every night (http://kho.unis.no/Forecast.htm). 

I spent a large portion of the next weekend working on my Gates-Cambridge application, a stressful activity that came to a head on Wednesday, the due date. The website kept crashing and I had to retype all my essays. Thankfully I turned everything on time, which was a huge relief. 

The days have been getting shorter and shorter, but on Friday, the world turned to winter like a light switch. I woke up and it was dark, barely lighter than night. Overnight, a thick layer of snow has built up all over Longyearbyen. Before it had been a thin layer on the mountains, but now there are areas that are more than a foot deep. My friend Sarah and I walked through the deep snow before it had been plowed and enjoyed an amazing breakfast of Scandinavian waffles at the Radisson Hotel before class. The power went out briefly and we watched in darkness as the blue-tinted world of the polar night lightened shade by shade. That evening, I made a snowman and made hot spiced wine and vegetarian Greek stew (stifado). 

The next morning, I went on a very snowy hike to the top of Sarkofagen, the nearby plateau, with my friends. The morning...er noontime... was beautifully sunny, but by the time we got to the top of the mountain, the sun was already beginning to set.

As winter begins in earnest, I hope to see lots more auroras, drink more hot drinks, make more snowmen, and maybe get some more graduate school applications done.

Fjords, rough seas, sea-ice, ice cream, and other things found in the Arctic Ocean (Part 2: 9/25-9/28)

9/25

My watch was during one of the long straight parts, but you can see we turn a lot 

Watch from midnight to 2A.M was uneventful. We didn't turn or core, so there was no changes in the instruments. I tried to write postcards, but a fellow classmate, Svenja, stayed up an extra two hours to talk with us. We, Svenja, our supervising PhD student, and me, talked about food, her exes, geology, etc. In the end, I was only able to write one postcard. After my watch, I just collapsed into a sound sleep. I dreamed that my friend Sebastian and I were running away on a bus, but we only had a single bus ticket between us and no money. And too soon, the woman over the PA system informed us 'Frokosten vergig!'  breakfast was ready.

I had the norm for breakfast: salmon and toast, peanut butter and Nugatti on toast. The sun shone brightly over the horizon through the window, but it disappeared behind thick clouds within the hour. It was surprisingly warm when I went outside, but there were no islands in sight, only the dark ocean. I spent the morning working on our field report with my group. They teased me about taking such detailed diary notes about each meal. But we have A LOT of information for our cruise log, so...we'll see who's laughing at the end. Cake time was vanilla cheesecake, and we spent the morning waiting to analyze our core. Lunch was smoked cod and some kind of egg salad. In the afternoon, we took magnetic susceptibility measurements of our core. This sounds fancy, but it involved slowly pushing our core through a circular scanner in two cm increments while turning the scanner on and off. It took over two hours. As we did this, we talked about how old we were when we had our first kisses. Well, I asked and was informed that this question goes against Scandinavian sensibilities. But then, one of my groupmates told me that they play what is basically spin-the-bottle as part of normal elementary school teacher-supervised playtime. So...that's gross. When we were done with scanning the core, we realized we were somehow missing two centimeters, so we had to do the last section for a second time, and still came up two centimeters short.

After scanning, we got to split our plastic core tube to see what was inside. Well, one of the graduate students split it for us. Tried to. About a third of the way down the first core, the rotary saw stopped and started smoking. Again and again, the saw stopped as soon as it got a third of the way down. We had to call both instructors to help us, and for a while it seemed like the core-splitter was completely broken and we and anyone who came after us would not be able to open our cores. But then Prof. Riko Noormets was able to get the saw to work normally. Our first core section was split weirdly, with cuts from either side not meeting in the middle, but the other two sections were fine. I had to hold the core sections firm as the saw came just below my fingers, but of course nothing happened. We loaded this split cores onto the service elevator and took off our Regatta suits and helmets and went downstairs to cut them open.

Opening the first section with the screwed up cut was an operation. I mean this literally. After we failed to open it normally with a cheese-wire, we called for help. There were three geology professors hovering over it, passing tools back and forth. Kelly Hogan gingerly opened it and then transferred sediment from one half to the other. I wanted to be helpful during this, but all I managed to do was hit my head hard on a metal air duct jutting out of the wall. We labelled one of them 'archive' and wrapped it up and sent it to storage.  We cleaned off the surface of the core-half with glass microscope slides to expose a nice flat surface. Then we went to work logging the core, describing any fossil shells, color changes, sediment changes. The first section was really boring, nearly all just featureless mud.  My head hurt still and I was beginning to feel sick, possibly a combination of sea-sickness and head-bump. We all were feeling irritable and slow, and I needed to stand outside to get some fresh air. I took a break for dinner, I had pasta and crackers. No one felt like working after dinner, so we broke for the day. I went back to my room and read Jack Vance's The Dragon Masters, which was good if a little strange as many sci-fi novels from that era are.

Sunset over the Arctic Ocean

9/26

I woke feeling refreshed, or at least back to normal. We spent the morning logging our core, which was equal parts fun and frustratingly chaotic. Having five people simultaneously analyze a single core was difficult. When we were finally done describing our core and our lunch of fish cakes and pasta, we moved on to doing magnetic susceptibility analysis again, this time with a point sensor. We pressed a circle shaped sensor along every centimeter of our core, all 283 centimeters. This took quite a long time, and I left for my watch at 4pm. My two-hour watch was spent writing postcards and reading. When I came back to my group at 6pm, they were cracking open rocks with a rock hammer to determine lithology, and had inadvertently chipped a small hole in the paint of the floor (shh, don't tell anyone). Katrine Husum, the micropaleontology professor, informed us that we would not be able to do any more work on our core that day due to the backlog of groups at the shear strength testing apparatus and microscope stations, so we split up. I read until dinner, then had meat and french fries. At 9pm, Prof. Julian Dowdeswell of the Scott Polar Research Institute gave us a lecture about British polar exploration and SPRI. As he described the Endurance voyage of Ernest Shackleton, loud scraping began to vibrate through the ship. "And his ship became trapped in the sea ice," he said, raising his voice as the scraping of sea ice against the ship became louder, "and then it sank."

After the lecture, I rushed up to the bridge to watch us pass through the sea ice. It was beautiful but difficult to photograph, even though the setting sun was painting the pancake-shaped sea ice islands orange to violet. In the sky, a few stars twinkled, and I used my phone's StarMap application to identify some of them. Jupiter was just above the horizon, and the moon was just a little above. It was soon completely dark, and I went back to my room. I stayed up late reading Paradises Lost by Ursula K. Leguin, a short science fiction novella about a multi-generational space voyage which I have read four times now. The ice continued to loudly scrape against the ship, so there wasn't much point trying to sleep anyway. If I had stayed up a couple hours later, I may have seen some of the lunar eclipse, but I had no idea that it was going on.

9/27

I woke up and we were south of the sea ice. I had breakfast, tried to shower but was locked out again. We started our shear strength testing. The apparatus is a little metal cone on a stick that is suspended above the sediment core with a magnet. With a push of a button, it drops the cone so that it sinks a depth into core. The depth is measured with the little ruler on the underside of the apparatus. Then the depth it sank and the weight of the cone correspond to a shear strength on a table. It was tedious and imprecise. We took turns, and when I was off, I worked on making graphs of our data. And let me go on record to say that Apple's Numbers program, their version of Microsoft Excel, is awful. Really just the worst.

After we finished with shear strength testing and lunch, Prof Husum took us to take samples for foraminifera testing. We took our cores and chose spots that we wanted to test for forams. Then we silently cut into the cores and scooped out semi-circular chunks of mud and put them into plastic containers. There was something very ritualistic about it, but that could also be because I was reading a Lovecraftian story beforehand. With our little containers of mud labelled, we went outside to the trawl deck to sieve them with a salt-water hose. After sieving for two years with filtered tap water and deionized water as my lab job, using sea-water for sieving seemed sacrilegious, but it was fine. The hardest part was delicately holding the sieve and paintbrush or small plastic containers of sieved sediment with thickly gloved hands. But the weather was warm and I didn't get too wet, so it was all pretty low-stress. We took our sieved samples inside and got to work counting and identifying forams through microscopes. The professor looked at my sandy sample and told me she didn't think there'd be any in mine. But I showed them all. I found over fifty forams in an hour, which is more than anyone else in my group. Having spent nearly everyday for the past two years picking out similarly sized ostracods from similar sediment helped. We graphed our results (goddamit Numbers) and started to work on our final presentation. It was strange to be done with everything on the ship except our presentation. There was no more reason to go outside.  The ship had begun to rock more than it had before, so I didn't have much appetite for dinner. At nine thirty, we started watching a movie about Ernest Shackleton. There wasn't sea ice to make scraping sounds, but we did watch the Endurance roll around on the Southern Ocean while we ourselves were swaying in the Arctic Ocean. It was a good movie, though I have read the account of the Endurance, so I knew what was going to happen pretty well. We watched up to the point where they arrived at the Antarctic sea ice extent and then turned it off to go to sleep.

9/28

I woke up to the ship pitching from side to side and a presentation to prepare. I had a bit of breakfast and then had some last minute presentation preparation. We gathered in the little lecture hall. I was clutching my travel-sickness bag like a magic amulet my life depended on. Half our class was sea-sick with the current rolling around, but we were still expected to deliver a coherent and scientifically rigorous presentation of our results to not only the entire class, but all of the professors as well, who were particularly aggressive in their questions. It was surreal. Because of the ship's motion, we would not be bringing out our cores to present to the class. Because we had thought we would be showing our cores, we didn't put any pictures of the core in our Powerpoint presentation. Also, we had the least time to prepare of all the groups. Thankfully, they let us take a ten minute break before our presentation. (I later learned that my group-mate had requested this break so she could throw up). Finally it was our time to present, and the ship was still rocking around. My classmates, those that were still here and not in their bathrooms,  and my groupmates looked glum, and I was nervous about trying to impress the professors. But we did it, and I think we had a good presentation. The unusual circumstances of the presentation made the entire thing seem a bit more relaxed.

After presentations, I spoke with Prof. Dowdeswell about the Masters program at SPRI, and he was extremely encouraging and helpful, even going so far as to help me come up with a research proposal.

We were travelling back to Longyearbyen, but we made a slight detour into a fjord whose name I regretfully cannot remember. Here's a photo dump:

A very isolated hut

 It was beautiful, but I was ready to be home with my internet and solid ground.  We watched the last half of the Ernest Shackleton movie, and it was fine...I wish we could have seen his return to England, as the movie's arc seemed to set up a framing device in this regard. But overall a good movie. I went to sleep, excited to return home the next morning.

Our return to the sheltered waters of Billefjorden was uneventful. We suddenly had wi-fi, and I got to work going through my emails and Facebook notifications. I didn't realize that the website tracking our ship had been down while we were north of 80ºN.