After my last post on October 22nd, everything changed. The captain got on p.a. system and announced that because of the weather forecasts/models, we would be steaming to Dutch Harbor at full speed ahead. Both very high winds and seas were predicted. So, instead of arriving on Thursday, October 27th we arrived in the evening on Monday, October 24th. While we hit choppy seas, we arrived in Dutch with calm weather and seas, and a temperature of 58o F. The light was beautiful as we came into port. We had steamed almost 750 nm (860 mi) in a little over 48 hours.
Nearing Dutch Harbor
Coming into the port
Since Monday, most everyone is going back and forth into town, either walking or taking the “Liberty vans” that the Coast Guard runs. People are hitting the bars, restaurants, and stores after almost two months of having no access to them. While the weather when we arrived in Dutch Harbor was good, today, the weather forecast is living up to the predictions as it is raining hard and blowing even harder, with gusts up to 50 knots. For a few hours, the Liberty vans weren’t running, and we couldn’t get off the Healy.
The airport here, DUT, is small with a short runway. All flights in and out have been canceled over the past two days and everyone is looking at or discussing the weather forecasts and trying to figure out what to do. Options are to hang in there for our various flights or to consider staying on the Healy until Juneau and then flying out from there after the ship arrives. Unfortunately, there’s no way to know what to do. We’ll see! It’s life in the Aleutians.
High winds whipping up the spray and waves, October 26th
In this post, I’m continuing writing about three of the senior scientists on the trip, Seth Danielson, Jackie Grebmeier, and Lee Cooper.
Seth Danielson is an Associate Professor of Oceanography at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Lehigh University and M.S. and a Ph.D. degree in Oceanography from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). He was the 2021 recipient of the Alaska Ocean Leadership Award for Marine Research by the Alaska Sea Life Center. He has served on the scientific advisory boards for a variety of regional and national programs.
Danielson has studied the Arctic as an oceanographer for nearly 30 years. He became interested Arctic science in his mid 20’s when he began looking for a way to apply his technical background as an electrical engineer to scientific field research. He had already decided that he didn’t want to work in industry and that brought him to Fairbanks, Alaska and into the world of high-latitude science joining trips to Antarctic and Greenland as an engineer. Soon after, he enrolled in a graduate program for physical oceanography at UAF.
Since the mid-1990s, Danielson has sailed as an oceanographer to the Arctic and sub-Arctic dozens of times, conducting research from large icebreakers, small coastal boats, and other vessels. He has lived in Fairbanks, Alaska for nearly 30 years and though Fairbanks is not in the Arctic, it is only 120 miles south of the Arctic Circle. He finds it to be a very convenient place from which to work and study the oceans surrounding Alaska. Danielson also plays clawhammer style banjo and is a founding member of the contradance and festival band Ice Jam. He resides with his family in Fairbanks, AK, in a self-designed wind and solar powered home.
As a physical oceanographer, Danielson studies the motion of the ocean (currents and waves) and the physical properties of seawater (salinity and temperature). He leads ongoing studies that monitor how currents and temperatures change from week-to-week and from decade-to-decade, including the continuation of observation programs and lines of study begun over 50 years ago by his predecessors.
The primary instrument Danielson works with is the conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) system, which is an electronic system that measures temperature, salinity, pressure, light, chlorophyll, turbidity, and nutrients. He also deploys oceanographic moorings, which autonomously record sensor data for a year at a time. At the end of the year, he and his team recover the instruments and download the data. His lab also deploys autonomous underwater vehicles called “gliders” (think underwater drone), which are piloted from the lab at UAF and can remain out in the ocean for 3 months at a time. He also works with acoustic and radio-wave sensors that measure the speed and direction of ocean currents.
Seth Danielson’s research can help policy makers and resource managers make scientifically informed decisions. He writes: “As the Arctic warms, new challenges are requiring a careful balancing act that considers numerous voices and interests, and the challenges are likely to only increase in the future as various social, environmental, and ecological thresholds are crossed. These include economic drivers, the marine industry - including pan-arctic shipping and natural resource development - conservation ecology and biodiversity, and human rights of the Indigenous peoples who have lived in the Arctic for many millennia.”
His work and that of others on our trip on the Healy as part of the Synoptic Arctic Survey is providing information that will be needed to meet the coming challenges of an Arctic that looks and functions differently than in the past.
For more information about Seth Danielson:
Jackie Grebmeier has been a Professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences (UMCES; Chesapeake Biological Laboratory) since 2008. She holds a B.A. in Zoology (1977), a M.S. degree in Biology (1979), M.S. degree in Marine Affairs (1983), and a Ph.D. in Biological Oceanography (1987). Following a postdoctoral position at the University of Southern California, she then spent 20 years at the University of Tennessee (1989-2008) before joining CBL in 2008.
Professor Grebmeier's oceanographic research interests are related to pelagic-benthic coupling, benthic carbon cycling, and benthic faunal population structure in the marine environment. In simpler terms, she looks at relationships between benthic (bottom) and pelagic (surface) animal and plant life. Benthic sea life is an important part of the Arctic biomass.
She has participated in more than 66 oceanographic cruises including 14 on the Healy, primarily in the Arctic, acting as Chief Scientist on many of them. She has led multiple interdisciplinary Arctic programs and is currently the lead scientist for the Distributed Biological Observatory (DBO) in the Arctic, which has been supported since 2010 by multiple agencies in the US and international collaborators in the Pacific Arctic Group.
Professor Grebmeier was appointed by President Clinton to the US Arctic Research Commission from 2000-2003 and served as the US delegate and one of four Vice-Presidents to the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) from 2006-2014. She has received multiple awards, including the Alaska Ocean Leadership Award from the Alaska Sea Life Center in 2015, the IASC Medal in 2015, the UMCES President’s Award for Excellence in Application of Science in 2017, and she was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018.
She is also co-chair with another member of the science party, Dr. Carin Ashjian, of the United States Synoptic Arctic Survey (SAS) Committee, and member of the International SAS committee. Jackie and Carin were co-chief scientists on the HLY2202 SAS cruise.
Professor Grebmeier is also a major force in the United States and world Arctic community. For many years she did research with Russian scientists on the western side of the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea looking at the production of benthic faunal populations in relation to ecosystem drivers. She is also involved with many other national and international scientific organizations investigating the Arctic from Canada, China, Japan and Korea as part of the Pacific Arctic Group and works with many European colleagues.
Find out more about Professor Grebmeier at: http://Arctic.cbl.umces.edu and http://DBO.cbl.umces.edu
Lee Cooper has been a biogeochemist for over 35 years. Growing up in Southern California he became interested in marine plants and interestingly, he found that some of the same plants that grow in the Pacific off Southern California also grow as far north as the Alaskan Peninsula. As a young man it seemed “promising to leave Los Angeles in a northerly directly.” Following that track, he moved to the University of California Santa Cruz for his undergraduate work. He continued his northward movement north to the Bodega Marine Lab, north of San Francisco where he met his future wife, the marine scientist, Jackie Grebmeier. From California he moved to Seattle getting his MS at the University of Washington.
The North continued its pull and he moved to Fairbanks for his PhD to study with a scientist prominent in the study of sea grass ecosystems. He did his research on the eel grass beds near Cold Bay, Alaska that are the largest in the world. While there, he became interested in the physiology of photosynthesis in sea grasses that led to post doc work on isotopic variability in plants. That, in turn, led to a “real” job at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee where he worked for 10 during the 1990s.
In the 1990s revelations became available about significant dumping of radioactive material in the Arctic by the former Soviet Union and Cooper began studying its effects on the Arctic. He continues his research on the Arctic ecosystem that has led to his continuing research into climate change in the Arctic.
Cooper has participated in many cruises on the Healy. On this trip, Cooper is part of the team effort doing measurements that are critical to the understanding of the physics, chemistry and biology of the water column and sediments in the Arctic. His research here includes chlorophyll in the water and the sediments, nutrients, dissolved organic carbon, and stable isotopes of oxygen that provide information on water masses and the sources of freshwater in surface waters.