days 17-19

These past days we have done CTD casts, deployed a mooring, and CTD casts again.
Yesterday, I saw something beautiful : the sea was covered with a very thin and transparent layer of ice, and as the ship was cutting through it, cracks were appearing and propagating from the ship's hull. The light was such that the cracks appeared like white streaks over the dark background of the sea, resembling lightnings in the sky !

Today I witnessed another beautiful show of nature : the full moon was setting ...

... as the sun was rising ...

... painting everything in warm orange and pink colors.

Below some ice raftings undulate over waves from the ship's wake.

days 15-16

Since the seal tagging, my excitement, which had reached a climax, is slowly fading out, as we are entering a more routine work schedule, which consists mainly in CTD casts, and I am starting to get used to seeing ice, penguins and seals around me. I am not getting bored for that matter, since we are kept busy by our work watches, and I am still enchanted by what I see around me. I am missing Marion and Margot, but I see them by skype about every other day, which eases the separation.

Below are some pictures of a crabeater seal, or white seal, the most abundant seal in the world, according to the book Antarctica - A guide to the wildlife, by Tony Soper. They have a creamy white pelage in the summer, and moult to a darker one in the winter.
Contrary to what their name suggest, they do not eat crabs ! They eat krill and other crustaceans. They may have been named as a result of confusion when translating from Scandinavian languages. According to my Norwegian watch buddies, Kjersti and Helge, these seals are called "kräft ätare" in Swedish, which means "shrimp eater". Kräft was then probably incorrectly translated as crab...




You don't want to annoy these animals : they can move at 25 km/h on ice !

Penguin's chat

Joe (penguin on the right) : "I'm bored, Dude, don't you have a joke you haven't told me yet ?"


Jack (penguin on the left) : "How do whales weigh themselves ?"
Joe : "...?"

Joe : "... dunno..."

Jack : "They go to a whale-weigh station !"
Joe : "Pffff..."

Joe : "How do you do to remember all these jokes ?"


Jack : "Well, I remember them, that's all !"


Jack: "Don't worry, I'll tell them to you again and again."


Joe: "Yes, but this is unjust..."


Joe : "WHY DO I ALWAYS FORGET JOKES ??"


Jack : "Look, there's a train coming !"




Jack : "Let's go to the railway station, Joe, let's get out of here !"


Joe : "All right, it's getting too cold anyway..."

Days 13-14

Seal tagging time has arrived !
We are putting the little instrument packages shown below on seals, glued on the back of their neck, to record temperature, salinity and pressure as the seals dive. The data is transmitted by satellite when the seals surface. The instruments stay about a year on the seals, and are lost when the seals slough their skin.

Yesterday, they tagged two seals while we were sleeping. When I learned that we were tagging seals, I was really excited ! I watched on the ship's bridge for seals. We spotted one, but only one non-expert person was allowed to come and help the other 5 experts, and the first try was for Kjersti, the Norwegian girl from the University of Bergen. I followed attentively the procedure and took some pictures from the ship deck. After they had come back, we started watching again for other seals. We spotted another one, aligned the boat along the ice float where the seal was resting, and I was offered to come and help for this one ! I went in my cabin to put on warm clothes, ran to the wet lab, but nobody was there. I went back to the bridge to learn that the seal had run away... Patience ! Soon thereafter, another seal was spotted, and we prepared ourselves. We were lifted from the ship deck in the air by the ship crane, swung over board, and carefully landed onto the ice float. I thank Kjersti Daae for taking the following pictures, in which I am the one with the black pants and red bonnet.


Once on the ice float, we had an orange stick to try the ground before us, to avoid falling through a hidden hole into the ice-cold water ! The yellow bag hanging from our life vest contains a rope that we could throw to somebody that would have fallen into the water, in order to get him out.

At first I was not too reassured, but then the ground felt solid and thick enough, and I gained some (illusory ?) confidence. I could feel the whole ice float slightly rolling, very slowly, which reminded me constantly that we were floating over the freezing water...

I am not allowed to show publicly pictures of seal tagging, unfortunately, because although no harm is done to the seals, the British Antarctic Survey wants to avoid unnecessary publicity for this activity. But I can show some pictures of the seal alone that we tagged. She was a beautiful Weddell Seal female with big dark brown eyes, measuring 234 cm long.

I could feel her skin, which looked like polar fleece, with the characteristic white spots of Weddell Seals.

After the tagging procedure was finished, a new living Automated Underwater Vehicle (AUV) was born !
And one of my dearest dreams, to approach a wild seal in its natural environment, had just been realized.
What else could I expect from this cruise, except for visiting the Halley base on the ice shelf ?...

To cap it all, two inquisitive penguins came to watch what the hell we were doing ! They even looked happy to be taken photo after photo like stars, but they were not the only ones to be happy !!!

Day 12

Another wonderful day ! Nothing better than a CTD watch to take pictures of seals and penguins (see below).
We started the watch with a beautiful weather, but soon fog came upon us, creating an eerie atmosphere.

Sometimes only a thin layer of ice was covering the water, and geometrical patterns called ice fingers could be seen here and there...

... sometimes even looking like words :

The passage of the ship through the ice breaks down the thin ice cover into many pieces, creating a giant puzzle :

Back to the CTD casts : a station consists in stopping the ship, lowering the CTD rosette in the water down to just above the bottom, and pulling it back up. Here is the rosette coming back to the deck after a cast :

Plastic bottles, called Niskin bottles, are attached to the rosette. They are all open first, and can be triggered to close at any depth, sealing water inside from this depth for subsequent analysis of salinity, oxigen isotopes, nutrient content, and other properties. Attached to the CTD frame are also various sensors, including Acoustic Doppler Current Meters (the yellow and black devices).


Once the rosette is back to the deck, the Niskin bottles are emptied in glass bottles for subsequent laboratory analyses, and the ship moves to the next station. We did not took many bottles, and the stations were sufficiently far apart from one another, to leave us some time in between to take pictures. Since I was dressed up warm enough to stay outside for hours, I had plenty of time to watch for seals and penguins, and I got my share of nice pictures ! Below are the best shots.








During a CTD station, an emperor penguin approached the ship on a nearby ice float, to see what we were doing. All our cameras were quickly put into action !

Days 10-11

After the exhausting deployment marathon, I woke up at 5:30 am the next morning, the breakfast time, in case we would be deploying the last mooring. But there was too much sea ice and it had been decided during the night to postpone the deployment for the way back. I could have slept longer ! At lunch I learned that we were going to start taking 12-hour watches every day for CTD (Conductivity-Temperature-Depth) stations and other mooring work. I was to take part in the night watch, from midnight to noon. So I went back to bed after lunch, and slept until the evening. When I woke up, the ship was stopping along the ice shelf, at a location where the shelf was low enough to be able to transfer people from the ship onto the ice. This is from where we will go visit the Halley base later during the cruise.


The only sign on man's presence in this wild landscape:

Then we sailed away to go retrieve a mooring that had been deployed two years earlier. The contrast of surface color between the ship wake and its surroundings is due to the presence of small pebbles of ice in the water.
Finally, we went past the ice shelf and saw the Antarctic continent, covered in ice. Much of the continent is like that, a smooth mass of ice. Only in a few locations do mountains emerge from the ice.

The mooring recovery ended up being tricky. The release mechanism was triggered and sent the signal that it had released, but the mooring remained anchored on the bottom ! We therefore decided to drop two lines from the stern and the bow of the ship, with an additional line in between, that we dragged laterally over the bottom. We had to localize the mooring location with a precision of less than 100 m (the ship is ~ 90 m long) for this to work. Amazingly, at the first try, the mooring finally poped up at the surface (look for the tiny red buoy in the picture below) !