Day 12-14 at RV Helmer Hansen (28.07.2011 08:30)
Toktblogger:
Johan Faust,
PhD-student, NGU
Date: 27.07.2011
Time: 11:40
Pos: 7001.687N 01137.066E
Weather: 8.1°C, Cloudy, Windspeed 5 m/s
Waterdepth: 2821 m
Very unusual: the island Jan Mayen is almost cloud free.
We were very lucky with the weather. We had calm see and sunshine almost during the whole cruise.We are heading back to Tromsø. It takes three days to go back to Norway. But it is no lazy time. The cruise report has to be written and the ship needs to be cleaned. Yesterday we passed the island Jan Mayen. It was the first time since we left Tromsø that we saw land again. Normally the island is always covered by clouds. But we were very lucky during the whole cruise with the brilliant weather, and the island was almost cloud free. Even the crew was standing outside on deck to see it.
After two weeks of working and living onboard we will soon reach Norway and we will go back home to our own countries and cities around whole Europe. It was a great adventure, sailing around the Arctic, discovering this extreme part of the world with all its rough beautify of ice and animals we only know from the zoo or the television before. Working and living in this small universe Helmer Hanssen for two weeks was often like being on a class trip. With two to three people in each small cabin, sharing the bathroom with the cabin aside and always people around you was most of the time great fun, but sometimes also exhausting.
Some of us are already at home with their thoughts, thinking about the coming task and the well-deserved holidays. Others are more melancholic that the cruise and the little adventure will be over soon. I will miss the view of the open ocean when I am back at home. There is just water around you every day but it is never boring and the view to the horizon is relaxing and provides a good feeling of freedom and infinity. I like to travel and to sail round the world. I am lucky that I have almost no problems with seasickness and that I can enjoy every day of the cruise. I hope that it doesn’t take too long until I get the next opportunity to go on an expedition and discover new things and parts of the world.
The Fulmar birds on the left followed us the whole journey since we left Tromsø. The Puffin (right side) crossed just once near the Jan Mayen island.
Day 8-11 at RV Helmer Hansen (28.07.2011 08:24)
Toktblogger:
Johan Faust,
PhD-student, NGU
Date: 24.07.2011
Time: 16:34
Pos: 7003.178N 01833.452W
Weather: 2.8°C, Sunshine, Windspeed 1,6 m/s
Waterdepth: 1288 m
Unfortunately, we could not reach Greenland. We tried a couple of times to find a way through the sea ice but every time we tried to get closer to the Greenland shore at one point we had to haed back because the ice was getting too thick for the Helmer Hanssen. Therefore we decided to concentrate our work on the continental margin of Greenland. Again we mapped the sea floor for a couple of days to identify the seafloor structures and to find good spots for coring. By now the work on board has become a matter of routine. Drilling and seafloor mapping is still fascinating but it is also normal daily work now.
We cannot get closer to Greenland; the ice is too thick to get through. Diane Groot is waiting for the next sediment core.
Day 6-7 at RV Helmer Hansen (27.07.2011 15:34)
Toktblogger:
Johan Faust,
PhD-student, NGU
Date: 22.07.2011
Time: 15:03
Pos: 7035.909N 01801.646E
Weather: 3.2°C, Sunshine, Windspeed 4 m/s
Waterdepth: 1702 m
Michael Blaschek and Frazer Davies lookout for animals on and between the ice floes. (Photo: J. Faust)
We are now close to the shore of Greenland and yesterday we crashed through sheets of ice for the first time. The Helmer Hansen is not an ice breaker but it is able to ram the ice floes and push them away. The whole ship is shaking when it hits an ice sheet. It is also a horrible noise in the cabins which are at the waterline at the bow of the Helmer Hansen. Therefore it is almost impossible to sleep while we are steaming through sea ice.
Anyway it is much more interesting to go outside on deck and see how the vessel is slowly finding its way through the ice and to look out for animals. So far we have seen some seals but everybody is waiting for polar bears and whales. Our plan was to steam into one of the eastern Greenland fjords but unfortunately our first attempt failed. There was simple to much ice. Now we are steaming further south where we hope to find less sea ice so that we can enter one of the fjords.
Left: View on the working deck of the Helmer Hansen while we are steaming through the ice. Right: Seal on an ice flow close to the vessel. (Photo: J Faust)
Day 5 at RV Helmer Hansen (25.07.2011 08:19)
Toktblogger:
Johan Faust,
PhD-student, NGU
Day 5
Date: 20.07.2011
Time: 11:35
Pos: 7351.277N 00630.392E
Weather: 5°C, Cloudy, Windspeed 14 m/s
Waterdepth: 3364 m
The first core is open and everybody wants to see it.After we finished the mapping we have taken some gravity cores. The gravity corer is a metal pipe which has a heavy weight on top. The pipe is pushed by the weight/gravity into sediments. It is one of the most often used devices to investigate the ocean floor because it is so simple and robust. Our corer has a maximum length of six meters. Immediately after the core is on deck we cut it into one meter pieces to make it handier and store them in a fridge. After that comes the most exciting part, the opening of the core.
The cores we have open so far show already a variety of colours and structures. Some have nice brownish and reddish colours with an interesting structure. Others smell heavily and are just grey and black. They have all an interesting story to tell and we have already started to investigate these cores. We have done a careful description and certain analyses. What we are investigating is the time after the last deglaciation, especially the climate development during the Holocene, the last 8000 years. We like to know what was the size of the glaciers in Greenland, Svalbard and Norway? How did they retreat? Did they retreat at once, was it a stepwise process and did they grow in between? With the sediments at the ocean floor we can recognize the history of glacier activity and therefore climate variability’s in the past. That is necessary because we have to understand past climate to predict future climate change.
The first core is open and everybody wants to see it. Right side: Katrine Husum explains the procedure of describing a sediment core in detail. (Picture J.Faust)
Day 2-4 at RV Helmer Hansen (19.07.2011 08:50)
Toktblogger:
Johan Faust,
PhD-student, NGU
Date: 17.07.2011
Time: 11:35
Pos: 7822.364N 00119.607E
Weather: 4°C, Cloudy, Windspeed 3.5 m/s
During the last 1 ½ days we steamed from the Svalbard shelf towards Greenland and crossed the northern part of Mid-Atlantic-Ridge. At this divergent plate boundary magma from the Earth’s mantle rises to the surface and continuously forms new oceanic crust which spreads out to the western and eastern side of the ridge. On the newly formed basaltic crust sediments settle down over time. And that is what we are looking for: Sediments. Sediments record plenty of information while they accumulate at the seafloor. Especially by studying the biogenic part of marine sediments we can for example reconstruct the history of the earth climate.
Jan Sverre Laberg controls the multibeam and seismic measurements in the instrument room.
Now we are mapping the surface structure the so called bathymetry of the seafloor a couple of kilometres westward of the ridge. Before we can start to drill into the sediments on the ocean floor we have to know how the seafloor looks like. Are there enough sediments or is there just hard bedrock? Is it a flat seafloor or a rather steep flank of a seamount? Moreover, by investigating the bathymetry we can recognize sediment transportation processes and identify the development of the ocean floor. Unfortunately we cannot look directly to the sea bottom, we need some high tech. We are using mainly two devices for mapping the seabed. One is a so called Multibeam. Normal vessels use an echo sounder to get information of the depth below the ship. The ship sends an acoustic signal and this “ping” is reflected at the bottom of the ocean. A Multibeam sends not only one “ping”, it sends more than 170 “pings” in a swath and that give us a high detail map of the ocean floor. The second device is a bottom penetration echo sounder. Is works similar to a normal echo sounder but the energy of the signal is much higher so that it is able to penetrate into the ocean floor and provide us with information about the structure and thickness of the sediment layer at the seabed.
Eythor and Patricia relaxing during the break.
While we are mapping the ocean floor we have some time to recover from the last days. Many of us had to fight with the seasickness a little bit and we also need some time to adapt to the six hour rhythm of the shifts. Going twice a day to bed gives us the feeling to be much longer on the Helmer Hansen as just a couple of days. Due to the midnight sun we are also losing the feeling for day and night. The only thing which changes during the day is the type of food on our plates.
Day 1 - Helmer Hansen (19.07.2011 08:37)
Toktblogger:
Johan Faust,
PhD-student, NGU
Pos: 7737.164N 00957.300E
Weather: 7°C, Sunshine, Windspeed 8m/s
We are sailing! It is a very good beginning of the cruise. The weather is beautiful. The sun is shining and everybody is looking forward to the next 14 days.
Already at 05:30 in the morning we went on board the RV Helmer Hansen in Longyearbyen harbour. Still a little bit tired, we got an introduction about safety, life and work on board the vessel. We are going to work in two teams and in a six hour shift schedule around the clock. As part of the safety introduction the crew arranged a rescue exercise before we had to steam out of the Isfjorden. Two of us (Alexey Deryabin and Eythor Gudlaugsson) had to jump from the vessel into the ice cold fjordwater with survival suits on and were afterwards rescued with the rescue boot from the ship.
Rescue of Alex and Eythor swimming in the ice cold water of Isfjord (Photo: M. Telesinski)
On the way to our first station we sailed into the Tryghamna fjord. At its end three glaciers are flowing into the fjord and we got an idea of how modern sediment transport works and how huge amounts of sediment are delivered into the fjord by these ice streams.
Jacques Giraudeau is looking at the ice streams entering the Tryghamna fjord (Photo: J. Faust)
Afterwards we steamed outside the fjord to our first station which was a couple of kilometres in front of the Isfjorden entrance. There we took our first gravity core. Now we are already on the way to our second station in which we will reach in around 3-4 hours. The gravity corer is a simple device which we use to recover sediment cores with a maximum length of 6 m. More about how and why we are taking gravity cores and what are we doing with the sediments later in this blog.
Greetings from Svalbard (19.07.2011 08:19)
Toktblogger:
Johan Faust,
PhD-student, NGU
This Ship´s log is written by CASE PhD students and provides an inside into the work and life on board the research vessel Helmer Hansen (previously Jan Mayen) on a cruise from 15 July to 28 July 2011 from Longyearbyen Svalbard to Greenland and back to Tromsø.
Foto: Rudi Caeyers
The expedition is part of the international research project “The changing arctic and subarctic environment (CASE)”. 10 PhD CASE Students from the University of Amsterdam, Plymouth, Bordeaux, Kiel, Tromsø as well as Irene Maier and Johan Faust from NGU Trondheim joining the cruise.
Together with colleges from the research school in arctic marine geology and geophysics from the University of Tromsø they investigate the marine environment and past and recent climate changes in area of the West Svalbard margin, Fram Strait and East Greenland using sedimentlogical, geophysical and paleoceanography methods.
The cruise is organized by Katrine Husum together with two colleagues from the University of Tromsø: Jan Sverre Laberg, Matthias Forwick and Jacques Giraudeau from the University of Bordeaux.
Track the cruise of the ship
About the research vessel