Day 7 Bergs for breakfast

Tabular iceberg

Fred posing with ice berg

Preparations for mooring deployment

Mooring deployment

Chinstrap penguin near the ship

Humpback whales

It's not every day that you wake you and see the ocean outside your bedroom window (or porthole for that matter). But even if you do, it's not particularly common to see the ocean totally calm like a mill pond. That's until you spot a line of whitecaps along the horizon, just like a reef or a shoreline ...

So I got up and headed down to the lab to say hello to the other scientists. They were all present and (a) been up all night writing papers and MATLAB scripts or (b) had entered the lab mere minutes before me and were now pretending to have been writing MATLAB scripts all night. In my sleepy-not-quite-yet-awake state I pointed out the whitecaps on the horizon, while at this precise moment our chief scientist started his stop watch.... Next, it was kindly pointed out to me that there were no whitecaps on the horizon. So I strained my eyes, picked up my binoculars, and proceeded to have a minor heart attack:

I C E B E R G S !!!!

While at that precise moment a stopwatch button clicked again with a reading of 15 seconds. That's how long it had taken me to figure out that I had woken up in Antarctica.

What a strange world aboard a ship in which you (a) wake up in public and (b) your view from the breakfast table is a never ending stream of bergs, growlers, bergy bits and the occasional tabular iceberg. It was my first time I had seen - with my own eyes - huge chunks of ice in the ocean. Some were snow white - glacier ice soaked in sea water. Some were a vivid blue - old and hard ice. And some were merely grey slush - the infamous and hard-to-see growlers. All of them were bits that had broken off the ice shelves of Antarctica - vast tongues of ice flowing out into sea from the Antarctic continent. This wasn't frozen sea water - all of
the bergs were ice that had formed from snow, i.e. made from fresh water rather than salty sea water (that would be sea ice then).

I had read books and magazines about ice bergs, watched countless polar-themed films and documentaries, but nothing - none of all of the photos and videos - prepares you for the moment that you gaze at a massive towering expanse of ice floating in ocean. As high as the White Cliffs of Dover, but even whiter - so white they're blue! Absolute magic. I was truly in "Frozen Planet" land.

Today we passed the latitude of 60 degrees South - the official start of Antarctica. Every sea and land south of 60° is international territory and cannot be claimed by any one nation. And when nobody can have a piece of it everyone has to obey special rules, e.g. ships carrying certain cargo or running on certain types of fuel cannot enter. The enginners on the ship need to know as they cannot discharge ballast water in these protected waters. South of this line one isn't allowed to get to within 6m of wildlife, or harrass or kill any animals. Companies can't drill for oil or prospect for minerals. All one can do is watch and learn. This is the territory of the Antarctic treaty of 1961. In a rare moment of self-less clarity the international community decided to protect the southern seas together with its vast ice-capped continent from human exploitation. Only scientific research would be allowed, and that's what we're here for.

First up was the deployment of a mooring in Orkney Passage - a saddle in an underwater ridge to the west of the South Orkney islands. The "passage" in the name refers to it being shallower than the ridge either side, so it allows dense bottom waters to flow northwards through this depression and spill over the ridge. These dense waters originate in the ferociously cold Weddell Sea, where freezing winds cool the surface
waters. That in turn increases water density and the denser, i.e. heavier, waters sink from the surface and flow along the sea floor into ever deeper ocean basins. That's where these dense waters accumulate
until they spill over any low-lying gap in the basin boundary. Such a gap is the Orkney passage. And what better place to monitor the outflowing dense waters than here.

We deployed a mooring with instruments to measure temperature, salinity and current speed on the western end of Orkney passage. Put simply, a mooring is a long daisy chain of instruments strung up on a cable. There's a big weight (the anchor) on the bottom end, the instruments in the middle and floats on the other end. When this assembly settles on the sea floor it will right itself and the instruments start to take
readings at given distances from the sea bed (i.e. as high up off the sea floor as the length of the cable in between). At the end of its life a ship will come back and recover the mooring and its data recorders for
analysis. To get the mooring back, the ship will then send a specially coded sound ping to an acoustic release at the bottom end of the mooring. The release controls a carabiner which, upon receiving the code, will open up to send the instruments to the surface for recovery. The anchor - in our case a railway wheel from a scrap metal dealer - stays behind on the sea floor.

The mooring deployment was done in glorious sunshine. The floats went over the stern first. As the cable was spooled off the winch, the instruments were clamped on the cable at predetermined distances (their eventual height above the sea floor) and at the end it was connected to the railway wheel which would anchor the mooring in place. When the ship had maneuvered to the right GPS position the winch dropped the anchor. The railway wheel splashed down, and disappeared into the depths pulling the whole mooring with all of its floats and instrumnets with it. After a minute or so even the last float had been dragged under. It took a further 5 minutes for the anchor to hit the sea bed. It will be more than 2 years from now until another human sees any of these devices again. As for the anchor - well, for the rusty old railway wheel it's a one-way journey to the bottom.

The CTD was deployed in the same spot to sample a profile of temperature and salinity, and the spar buoy went in the water too to calibrate its measurements of air-sea gas exchange.

All the time we were surrounded by bergy bits (this is indeed the technical term for small ice bergs). In between them we sighted several Antarctic fur seals, who were very skittish, and chinstrap penguins who were more sociable. These are truly antarctic birds and unmistakable for their squawking call. It sounds just like shouting for "M A R K !!", which must be odd for someone who is actually called Mark. These little fellows popped up all around the ship, poked their heads out, squawked "Mark" and swam off again.

We also saw several whales - southern right whales, fin whales and humpbacks. Not one of them was within decent photo range, most were barely within binocular range. Just to illustrate who far away they were, I have magnified the handful of pixels that show one of the whale sightings. You have to take it from me - it really was a whale. The photo is from the moment it raised its fluke and dived again.