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2 a.m., Beaufort Sea. The sun sinks into a fog bank amid the floes. |
Photo Essay » Going with the floes; Exploring the fringes of the Arctic Ocean
Originally published in Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Currents magazine, Volume 9, Number 4, 2003.
I stared out over the sea of ice from my perch in the bow of the USCGC Polar Star, the world's most powerful non-nuclear icebreaker. The sun had just dipped into a low fog bank and tinted the surrounding ice floes peach and magenta. We were caught in huge blocks of ice tumbled together like an upended box of giant-sized Legos. As the ship battered through the floes, she shuddered violently and the sound of cracking ice rumbled like distant thunder over the featureless expanse.
This is the Arctic Ocean - a deep, frigid sea capped by a blanket of constantly shifting ice. When we first passed from the steel-gray waters of the Bering Sea into the icy world of the Arctic Chukchi Sea, I remember my excitement – a quickening of my pulse and a twitchiness in my shutter finger. The ice is mysteriously hypnotic - you just can't stop watching it. The wind and waves carve odd shapes into the snow, and the ice ranges in color from a deep aquamarine blue to stark white to muddy brown. As the ship's bow smashes into the larger floes, cracks appear and knife through the slabs of ice before they are thrust aside. It's another world entirely, a place that has for centuries lured explorers seeking fame and scientists seeking knowledge. Like those before us, we are here seeking answers, but the questions are different.
The Arctic Ocean has been described as the "canary in a coalmine" which could signal the next abrupt climate change. Understanding the Arctic Ocean is critical to understanding our planet's ever-changing climate. Our multi-year, interdisciplinary research project, "Western Arctic Shelf-Basin Interactions" (SBI), seeks to measure the shelf edge system of the Western Arctic as it has never been measured before. This will provide an important baseline against which future measurements can be made. Our high resolution measurements will be used as data for models which will attempt to predict the changing Arctic climate.
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Melting summer ice surrounds the icebreaker Healy, which was also engaged in a scientific mission in the Beaufort Sea in 2002. |
The objective of our summer 2002 cruise aboard the Polar Star was to deploy moored instruments and measure water properties with a Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth (CTD) package. Over the course of this three-year field program, WHOI Principal Investigator Bob Pickart and his SBI colleagues seek to understand how waters from the Bering Sea travel across the Arctic Ocean's Chukchi and Beaufort shelves to the deep Arctic basin. Bob's "picket fence" of moored profiling instruments is designed to measure, over two full years, the complex exchange processes that transfer the Pacific-origin water to the deep basin. The fine spacing of the array yielded the most highly resolved picture of the Western Arctic shelfbreak ever obtained.
During our four weeks battling the Arctic ice in 2002 to deploy our moorings and CTDs, I documented both our scientific efforts and the raw beauty of this alien "land." Through my camera lens, this unique place seemed at times delicate and fragile, and at other times harsh and unforgiving. The following photos are my attempt to convey the wonder I felt working "in the ice."
