The ”other” grind

January 20 2019 (Note: this is #19 in a series of posts describing my NSF-sponsored fieldwork in Antarctica aboard the Laurence M. Gould).

Three days ago I posted about the “grind” of processing samples day after day. Today we moved back into the ice, and experiences the “grinding” of the ship as it moved through the sea ice. As we moved into thick ice, the science party clustered up on the bow to get a look. It was captivating to peer over the edge as brash ice swirled by, as we passed floes with layers of ice algae near the water surface, and as we broke through more solid chunks. One of my colleagues remarked that it was like picturing Pangea breaking apart [the ancient land mass that eventually split to form our modern continents]. It was truly captivating. The ice was so thick and viscous on the surface that it looked like peaks of whipped cream on top of a cake. Later, when I was sitting in the galley, I could actually feel a sliding and bumping sensation as we moved over and through the ice.

Working under such icy conditions is very challenging and requires judgement calls based on experience. The ship quickly drove a path through the ice to make a clear area. Then we carefully deploy and recover instruments. It’s a calculated risk because the ice eventually moves back into the cleared path and can snag on lines or nets. In this case, we took a conservative approach and just did a shallow tow with our smaller net. It was still a little tense in the wet lab as the net was being deployed and recovered.

I’ll confess that there was some extra “drama” going on in the background. Because I was not directly involved in this net tow, I was streaming the score during the last five minutes of a certain championship game for a major US professional sport (I’m pretty sure the National Science Foundation and the US Antarctic program don’t endorse any professional sports teams, so I’ll just let you guess). In the end, the net tow was safely recovered, I helped process the samples, and “my” team won in overtime. A very solid day, indeed.