Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
Arctic expedition reaches the ice
U.S. and Russian scientists exploring the Arctic ocean finally reached ice on Monday, about 435 miles (700 km) northwest of Barrow, Alaska.
On a year when the Arctic sea ice has receded in the summer to its third-smallest on record, researchers on the RUSALCA expedition got the opportunity to study the water, sea life and the ocean floor at a location where there is rarely open water.
The mission’s science chief, Terry Whitledge, said it he did not expect explore such a northerly location without an icebreaker.
The team took core samples from the seabed, more than 600 metres (1,968 feet) down from the surface.
“We think that is our biggest scientific gain,” Whitledge, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said by satellite phone from the bridge of the research vessel Professor Khromov.
The scientists are on a six-week expedition through the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea, coordinated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Russian Academy of Sciences, to gauge the impact of climate change on the region.
The weather has been mostly moderate for the time of year, but one recent Russian cold front made work on the ship tough by icing up the deck and freezing up some gear used to lower equipment into the ocean, Whitledge said.
Zodiac man gets his day
Rodney Russ lives for the times he is at the rudder of a Zodiac.
For the owner of Heritage Expeditions, the New Zealand-based company that is operating the Russian research ship Professor Khromov in the Bering Sea, the more challenging the conditions the better.
“The rougher the waves, the more difficult the landing, the more remote and obscure the place, the more I enjoy it,” Russ said in a corridor on the Khromov.
So it was with disappointment that Russ was forced to put the inflatable boat with the outboard motor away, after he had donned his wet-weather gear and readied the craft for a spin off the Siberian coast in late August.
The plan was nixed by the Russian navy representative on board.
It took months for the joint U.S.-Russian RUSALCA oceanographic expedition to get the necessary clearances to travel through Russian waters in the Khromov, deploying data-gathering moorings, and using a high-tech instrument to take water samples.
There was nothing in the permits about zipping around the ship in a Zodiac. Doing it could jeopardize the RUSALCA mission, which is geared to gauging the impact of global warming on the region over several years.
Fishing for information, Part II
The last of the data-gathering moorings to be plucked from the Bering Sea proved to be the most troublesome.
This one was several miles north of the Bering Strait in U.S. waters, and it took a few hours to steam up there in the Professor Khromov, the ship the RUSALCA team is using for the joint U.S.-Russian oceanographic expedition.
Once GPS pinpointed the location, the tech team in charge of retrieving the moorings sent the electronic signal that releases the chain of instruments and floats from the anchor on the ocean floor and waited. And waited. All on deck scanned around the ship for an orange ball on the water’s surface. It didn’t appear.
More beeps. Again, nothing.
After about 30 minutes, the mission’s chief scientist, Terry Whitledge, and Rebecca Woodgate, who is responsible for the mooring operations, put Plan B into action.
The high-tech gear, which has been gathering data on water content, temperature and other things 50 meters below the surface since last October, can’t just be left behind. It is key to the expedition’s mission of gauging the impact of global warming in the region.
This kind of trouble has been known to happen in the Arctic.
Fishing for information
The research vessel Professor Khromov is just a few kms off the easternmost point of Siberia, and U.S. technologist Kevin Taylor is struggling to reel in an orange buoy that had been deep beneath the Bering Strait for nearly a year.
The first time he tries, the ship veers too far away from the prize and must make a slow, wide turn for another pass. The second time, Taylor’s hook is not quite ready and the float bobs again into the Khromov’s wake. This takes practice, even in calm waters.
A main task of the RUSALCA expedition, a joint-U.S.-Russian scientific effort taking place in August and September, is to retrieve data-gathering moorings that were dropped 50 meters to the bottom during stormy weather last October, and to leave new ones.
It takes technological and navigational know how and, it soon becomes clear, the lassoing skills of a cowboy.
Attached to moorings are instruments that gather data on temperature, currents, salinity and other things tied to RUSALCA’s study of the impact of climate change on the region. Some of the new ones are even equipped with an instrument that listens for whales. They are held to the bottom by weights fashioned from train wheels.
Three are in Russian waters and five are on the U.S. side of the strait.
When the ship gets close to a mooring location the technical team tries to get a signal from the equipment to determine the exact location. If the unit is in the spot where it was dropped — that is, ice did not move it -– then the team sends an electronic pulse to open a mechanism that detaches the anchor, allowing the floats and instruments to float to the surface.
# “a single barnacle has been known to foul up# the release mechanism”Described in two words: bad design.
