a beautiful day in Ny Alesund

When I woke up this morning, a thick fog coated the town. Within twenty minutes, the fog had completed evaporated. Two days of fog turned into a beautiful Saturday in the field, topped off with wine night in the service building and a night at the bar. (On Saturdays, everyone around town dresses up for dinner and brings wine. Kings Bay even brings out the fancy paper napkins, and there are wine glasses!)

Ny Alesund coming out of the fog

our daily commute to the glaciers (which takes 30-60 minutes, depending on the wind and concentration of bergy bits)

After successfully deploying three sediment traps yesterday, we deployed another two today. Theo, who's thesis relies on the sediment traps, is quite excited about our success: as he puts it, he has "five buns in the oven." Hopefully none of them get moved or snagged by icebergs before we retrieve them; usually, about half of the traps will be lost.

our daily meeting to swap boats

Today Mike, Ross, and I also started to run transects across the fjord in front of Kongsvegen/Kronebreen with the echosounder. We recorded two transects today, both perpendicular to the ice face and out from the upwelling plume. After a few trial and errors (one of which involved running an entire transect and a failure on my part to record it), we developed quite an efficient system. Ross attempts to drive in a straight line and avoid icebergs. Mike records GPS points along the transect, since we do not have an automatic way to input this into the echosounder program. I watch the depth profile on the computer screen and make adjusts on the high and low frequency channels, and also tell Mike when to take waypoints. The best part is that, throughout all of this, my head is in a black plastic bag so that I can see the screen in the light. I remember when I was a kid my mom told me NOT to put my head in a plastic bag, and now that I am better educated and more mature I realize the flaws of her statement: only put your head in a plastic bag when it is for science and you trust the people around you take it off your head when you start to suffocate.

echosounder set up (and my head in a bag)

It's late (and still light out), so I'm headed to the bar!