NEW PHOTOS AND VIDEO!! Rare Arctic Gorilla Spotted!

Hello again everyone,


Well another day, another site, after some delay. Saturday’s and Sunday’s in Alert means no breakfast but brunch at 10:30. Instead we went down to our staging building and processed one of our texture cores.

Christian Haas sawing up ice cores with the band saw

Cutting the thick (thin) section (5mm thick) from the center of the ice core piece

Ice core piece under cross polarized light.  Note the switch from frazil to columnar ice (up is on the left).

First we section the cores into certain lengths, then we saw them in half vertically (along the length of the core) and then we slice a thin section out of the core. One person takes notes, 1 saws, 1 takes photos of the thin sections and one takes the rest of each piece of core and places them into individual containers so that we can melt them and measure the salinity (saltiness) of the ice. The process goes very quickly with 4 people and is somewhat enjoyable (for me), as you get to see the cores under polarized light and look at the ice crystals.

Today we went to a first year ice floe that we identified using satellite radar imagery from the ESA Envisat ASAR sensor. Radar images can provide a lot of useful information about sea ice, including distinguishing between first year ice and multiyear ice.
The trip to the new site took some tricky skidoo work, which meant for slow going at times, but it was quite fun. I really enjoy the technical bits. We went over ridges, huge snow banks (like 8-10 feet tall and 100-200 feet long). Unfortunately I was a bit too busy to take many pictures today.
At the site we managed to get four ice cores, two for Ido, one for us and one for Christine Michel. We also performed another drill/EM transect, setting up a transect that crossed from the first year ice over a ridge to an adjacent multiyear floe. The work on the first year ice went very quickly because it was only 1.4m thick. The multiyear floe was much thicker with several of our drill holes being over 6m long. Today Christian did some of the drilling while training Ian and Ido on it, while Alec and I began the EM survey (as they had all finished coring very quickly).
I was hoping to get my camera down the core hole today since the thinner multiyear ice should let more light through but everyone else was in a rush to get back for dinner and the core hole had already started to close up a bit so I didn’t want to risk it. Tomorrow I plan to get some more video and maybe another time-lapse.
After Alec spotted a whale yesterday, he now notices many ice animals, including this piece of ice that looks like a gorilla.

If you use your imagination, you maybe be able to spot the Arctic Gorilla like Alec did.

Well I suppose I better wrap this up soon. Tomorrow is Sunday so another brunch day but we plan to do a full station at a nice multiyear floe we found on the way back to the base this evening, so probably a bit of a late day as we won’t be able to start until after brunch which is around 1200, by the time everyone is ready to go and the sleds are packed up.

Cheers