Fram Strait

Well it is 2:23am on Sept 5. I am still up because I had to process some
data from today and do a 3am ice observation for someone.

Today we encountered a lot of ice, much more than we expected. Most of the
ice is in small floes (10-100m) with small water gaps between. We are
seeing a mixture of first year ice, which is ice that has not yet survived a
summer and multi year ice (which has survived at least one summer). Multi
year ice is thicker (usually) because it has had two or more winters to
grow.

Today was a busy day for the science team. We got in place for the mooring,
recovered the mooring, had an ice station from 1930 to 2330 and did a
helicopter flight from 2200 to 2250, oh and two CTD measurements.

A mooring is a host of oceanographic instruments (current direction/speed,
conductivity, pressure, temperature (and thus salinity) and other sensors
that are attached to a cable and some floatation devices and are anchored to
the bottom of the ocean using weights. The one we recovered today was
sitting in 2000m of water.

On ice stations we perform a variety of measurements including drilling for
ice thickness, taking snow depth, density, and other snow properties. We
use an EM31 which is a ground version of the EM bird we fly under the
helicopter (same exact principle of measurement), and we take ice cores.
We also have a couple people on this trip interested in borehole jack
studies and ridge dynamics. A borehole jack is a device that tests the
horizontal strength of the ice by using a hydraulic jack to push out on the
walls of a borehole made in the ice.
The ridge dynamics guys will be looking to take cores/drill through ice
ridges, which is a difficult and of painful task (painful in terms of sore
muscles and you often lose/wreck equipment).

Well that is all for me for today. I will do my ice observation in 30
minutes and then go to sleep until 0730. Need to fix a few things before
flying tomorrow and help the ice station team prepare in case they can go
out on the ice.

Justin