surreal and busy

Everything blends into one here. It is nearly impossible to judge time and distance. We can be 1 km or 100 m from the ice face, and it all feels the same - like you could just reach out and touch it. I also have no way to judge time (especially when it is cloudy and my watch is buried in my survival suit), and it is surprisingly pleasant to feel "lost in time." Still, my body desperately attempts to find environmental cues to know when to go to bed. Right now I judge bedtime as the time when the sled dogs bark and the sun shines directly through my window.

On top of that, tourist ships can drop off 3,000 people at one time in Ny Alesund. Considering the population of Ny Alesund is 50-100 people, this is quite a bit of shock to the system. It is strange to be on the other side of tourism for a change, and to be a "tourist attraction." When ever we see tourists taking pictures of us now, we jokingly ask "5 euro or 20 beers for a photo." If I earned $10 for every photo that has been taken of me, I might have enough money to pay for the rest of my college education. I've noticed that tourists particularly like to take photos of sediment cores and people dressed in dirty survival suits.

On Sunday, two huge tourist ships came into town. One dropped around 2,000 people and the other dropped close to 3,000 people.

Beyond contemplating the surreal nature of Ny Alesund (everyone does it here), we have been very busy. On Sunday, we covered most of the upwelling area with the echosounder. The discharge from the subglacial upwelling forces all the bergy bits out of the plume area, which is ideal for echosounding. On Sunday, the discharge was greater than usual and therefore we had a lot more clear water to navigate.

border of the plume, where the bergy bits collect

Yesterday, we collected Theo's three sediment traps from the delta and redeployed them in the same locations. Unfortunately, we lost one of those sediment traps today, likely to a berg. We also have lost both sediment traps deployed in the upwelling area because of a strong current, which forces the buoys lower than we can retrieve.

Today we continued with the echosounding in the middle of the Kongsvegen/Kronebreen face and near the delta. The ice front stayed rather stable all day, so it did not supply many obstacles (bergs) for the echosounding. Despite a cloudy, somewhat cold day, I stayed nice and toasty in my plastic bag. In fact, I produced enough hot air in the bag to cause it to "rain" on the computer. Woops.

When I get home from days when we used the echosounder, I have to input the GPS points manually into a spreadsheet because we do not have a USB cable. We take points every minute and typically run the echosounder for about 4 hours, so you can imagine how many points I have to input. So far, I have yet to make any pretty figures, but here is a rough preview of our transects thus far (without a base map, scale, or compass direction, unfortunately):

The ice front, which is to the right in this diagram, is about 2.5 km across. There are several obvious holes in our profiling thus far, but once those are full, we will likely go profile another of the toes of Kronebreen if we have time.

Now off to bed! I'm exhausted.