Dispatch 23: The MK-Line
Ashley Arroyo (Yale University)
September 21, 2024
12:00 UTC, 72.1°N 139.9W
Conditions:
- Mostly cloudy
- 0% sea ice cover
- 7°C
- Winds 12 knots northeasterly
- Sunrise: 21-Sep-2024 08:55:27 -06
- Sunset: 21-Sep-2024 21:32:11 -06
- Day length: 12h 36mn 44s
Early this morning, we arrived at the first station on the MK-Line (named for its proximity to the Mackenzie River) where the nighttime watch-standers began the stretch of tightly spaced stations with CTD/bongo casts. The MK-Line consists of 8 CTD/bongo stations, with depths ranging from ~3000-meters to ~70-meters deep, becoming progressively shallower as we steamed near the Alaskan coast. Because the stations were so close together, the ship slowed down to a speed of ~5 knots between stations to give the science team enough time to take water samples before deploying the rosette again at the following station. Since the entire group of stations took about 24 hours to complete, most of the science team was busy with rosette casts, bongo nets, water sampling, and filtering/analyzing samples. Everyone was helping!
By midnight, the science team had made it through 6/8 of the stations on the MK-line, leaving the last two shallow CTD/bongo casts with water sampling for the night watch-standers. The MK-line should be finished up around 4am, where the last station MK-1 will mark the final science station of the 2024 expedition!
