October 21st
Yesterday, the intense science of the past few days came to an end. Since then, we have been in rough seas with the ship rolling more than at any other time during our cruise. Last night around 11 pm, we all got pages that the Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis was visible. Though it had been visible on two other nights during the trip, I’d slept through the pages on my pager. It was very exciting to see.
Four image composite of Aurora Borealis siting
October 19th
In this post, I’m beginning writing about scientists on the trip. As I have mentioned before this is very hands on science, down and dirty with the science people and the crew coordinating and participating in the deployments of the scientific instruments, often in bitter cold and icy conditions. The gloves must often come off to adjust and, sometimes, to repair equipment before deployments.
Polar Science requires a great deal of flexibility. The white board listing the day’s deployments is called, “The Board of Lies,” because of the frequency that schedule changes must be made. Rigidity doesn’t work in the Arctic. Weather, seas, ice, and sometimes, shipboard, may cause science stations to be changed, canceled, or shortened.
As a non-scientist, interested in science, it was humbling to find out how little I knew about the kind of research being done on the Healy. After six plus weeks on the ship, I understand more, but not that much more. Though the overall goal of the research and data collection being done is to better understand the Arctic, much of the work is narrowly focused and frequently obscure to an outsider. It is, however, how science gets done, how data is acquired, and how fact is separated from fiction. Ultimately, it gives us more answers about how, where, and why the Arctic is changing more quickly than previous models predicted.
Since October 17th, the science work has been intense with most of the work being done 24 hours a day. There have been multiple stations everyday which is possible because the water is much shallower than when we were further north. Our track on the Chukchi Shelf, north of the Bering Strait, is taking us through a small canyon northwest of Hanna Shoal where the water depth is between 50 and 300 meters verses the 2000 to 4000 meters depths north in the Arctic Ocean.
Deployments follow a specific order in order not to “muck things up,” literally. The CTD, goes first followed by the VPR (optics), the various fine nets, followed by equipment that takes cores or grab mud from the bottom. (For more specific information on the instruments, refer to my post for September 10th – 12th.) The idea is to deploy equipment that won’t disturb the water column before the equipment that creates turbulence.
This evening I photographed small creatures, outside in the cold as they were filtered out from mud cores brought up from the bottom. The work with the mud is a messy business. It’s brought up with a Van Veen grab (a clamshell-like device) and dumped into a bucket. Immediately afterwards, the mud is carried to and dumped into a wooden frame with a screen at the bottom and the mud is carefully hosed away and off the deck into the sea. The living things at the bottom of the screen are counted, measured, identified, and recorded.
This sampling contained sea worms, clams, and other crustaceans
The following writing is taken from brief interviews with two of the scientists onboard, Laurie Juranek and Cedric Magen.
Laurie Juranek is an Associate Professor of Oceanography at Oregon State University. Her undergraduate degree is from the University of California, Davis and her PhD is from the University of Washington. She is a marine biogeochemist who is trying to understand the intersection of biology, chemistry, and physics in the Arctic Ocean.
Professor Juranek became interested in the Arctic through happenstance. In 2011, she started interacting with groups studying changes in Arctic while working as post-doc researcher at NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Her first trip to the Arctic, in 2011, was on the Healy. That trip opened a door for her, and she was hooked. On the Healy, she documented changes in the Arctic Ocean’s biogeochemistry, specifically looking at how the ecosystem was changing in the later part of the year as the ice came back.
Professor Juranek has returned on cruises to the Arctic almost every year since then, including several times as a chief scientist. In her research, she is trying to understand how ecosystems are responding to the dramatic changes in the ocean environment. Juranek studies changes in phytoplankton, including its patterns of primary productivity and growth. While phytoplankton is at the bottom of the food chain, these single-celled plants are the invisible forest of the ocean, supplying food for the entire ocean ecosystem. Specifically, she measures dissolved oxygen to tell us about the physical and biological process in the ocean.
She looks at the activity of these single-celled plants to see how they are responding to climate change: to the smaller extent of sea ice, to warming sea and air temperatures, and to the changing availability of nutrients. In the Arctic, there are increasingly, larger areas of open water that also remain unfrozen for longer periods of time that affect phytoplankton growth and location.
Like land-based plants, phytoplankton convert water into oxygen and carbon dioxide into plant matter (their body) through photosynthesis. Changes in the extant ice, light and temperature affect the availability of nutrients at the surface. The changes affect these single-celled plants which need both light and nutrients at the same time to grow and reproduce.
The changes and patterns of productivity at the surface of the ocean that Professor Juranek studies are of great importance. The changes affect the entire food chain including larger animals such as polar bears, walruses, whales, and humans. Her research also helps to understand the sequestration of carbon from the atmosphere in the Arctic Ocean, by trying to understand whether these changes are increasing, decreasing, or staying constant. Professor Juranek’s research helps us to understand the effects of global warming in the Arctic Ocean.
Cedric Magen is a research scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received his doctorate from McGill University, in Montreal, studying the geochemistry of Arctic Sediments. During his doctoral research, Magen spent time on the Canadian icebreaker Amundsen to investigate early diagenesis in recent sediments of the Mackenzie Shelf. Early diagenesis describes transports and reactions of chemicals involved in the degradation of organic matter into simpler molecules. This study helps us to understand how organic matter fuels sediment respiration, the respiration of the various types of living matter in the sediments.
Magen’s interest in oceanography began when he was young, after he saw the work of Jacques Costeau. In 2012, as part of his second post-doctoral work, he started studying methane in the Gulf of Mexico following the huge well blowout of the Deepwater Horizon. After this work, he was asked by a colleague, Lee Cooper, to run the Stable Isotope Lab at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. In 2017, Cooper, a long time Arctic researcher, asked Magen to join a cruise on the Healy in 2017 to the Chuchki Sea north of Alaska to look methane in the water column and shallow sediments there.
On this trip on the Healy, Magen is carrying out exploratory work to see if, and how much methane is in the deep basin of the Arctic Ocean. It is already known that methane is released from the bottom on the continental shelf, mostly in waters off Siberia. Magen wants to see if the circulation of the water masses carries this methane to the deep basin and if, and where it is released into the atmosphere.
Very little is currently known about the sources, dynamics, locations, and amounts of methane in the depths of the Arctic. Magen’s research will help to refine the modeling of this gas in the atmosphere. As methane is 20 times more per unit a contributor to global warming than carbon dioxide, it is critical to better understand the contribution from all the sources that increase its levels in the earth’s atmosphere.
Sunrise while steaming south.