Plan H
Arctic research requires patience, flexibility, and improvisation. You have to be prepared for all eventualities: bad weather, things getting broken, things getting lost, or experiments not working. It's not just Plan B; it's Plans F and G and H. Collecting data and answering meaningful questions in Arctic systems requires you to think on your toes and work with what you've got. If you sit around and wait for perfect conditions, trust me, perfection will never come.
So here are the cards I've been dealt:
- The wind is too strong to use Teisten. This boat is extremely capable in some ways, but it sits up high out of the water and in strong wind essentially becomes a giant sail. We would drift down the fjord in no time flat. Not gonna work.
- We have a zodiac that actually works pretty well in the wind. It doesn't stand up so tall over the water, and you can hold it in place with a small anchor.
- Our gear is light enough and small enough that we can actually fit it in the small boat and deploy it by hand.
- My team is experienced, enthusiastic, and willing to try new things.
Overall, not a bad hand. Erlend offered that he would be willing to try and take the small boat out of the harbor. There's an old pier just west of Ny-Ålesund that we could use as a shelter from the wind, so we started looking for suitable sampling points in the lee of the old pier. We sat down with the map, and lo and behold, it actually gets pretty deep behind the old pier. We had been planning to sample at 10 m and 30 m depth, and there seemed to be a magical spot where we were behind the old pier, not interfering with a permanent sampling installation, and the depth was 10 m. Could we go there?
Erlend was willing to give it a shot, so we loaded the boat and divided into pairs. Each pair would collect four samples, either zooplankton or sediment. We used a small anchor to mark the spot so Erlend could find it again after changing out personnel and gear.
The plan worked beautifully! The Polarsirkel boat glided over the few ice floes remaining in the harbor and rested easily on the anchored spot. I lowered and raised the plankton net to collect our samples, and then the next pair collected replicate sediment grabs. We were very happy!
The plan worked so well, in fact, that I asked Erlend if we could push it one step further. Could we peak out from behind the old pier to a spot at 30 m depth and collect samples there? He wasn't sure if it would work but agreed to try. We were able to collect the zooplankton samples, but everyone was too tired from hauling up the loaded sediment sampler from 10 m to try at 30 (which would have been 3x the lifting). Either way, I was very excited that we were able to get zooplankton samples from 2 sites and sediment from one! With a little creative thinking, we were able to conquer the conditions!
The samples we collected were well worth the effort, because they contained a number of very interesting species. I even found 3 baby sea stars! I wonder if they're the same species as the unidentified larva we found in the plankton samples before, and I look forward to analyzing them more in my lab back home to find out. Our samples demonstrate that at least some seafloor animals are reproducing in the middle of winter, which is a cool result all by itself. I'm so glad we were able to get creative and collect our samples despite the wind!
So here are the cards I've been dealt:
- The wind is too strong to use Teisten. This boat is extremely capable in some ways, but it sits up high out of the water and in strong wind essentially becomes a giant sail. We would drift down the fjord in no time flat. Not gonna work.
- We have a zodiac that actually works pretty well in the wind. It doesn't stand up so tall over the water, and you can hold it in place with a small anchor.
- Our gear is light enough and small enough that we can actually fit it in the small boat and deploy it by hand.
- My team is experienced, enthusiastic, and willing to try new things.
 |
| Ny-Ålesund harbor yesterday. The bright light is our boat returning with the samples. Photo by Marco Casula. |
Erlend was willing to give it a shot, so we loaded the boat and divided into pairs. Each pair would collect four samples, either zooplankton or sediment. We used a small anchor to mark the spot so Erlend could find it again after changing out personnel and gear.
The plan worked beautifully! The Polarsirkel boat glided over the few ice floes remaining in the harbor and rested easily on the anchored spot. I lowered and raised the plankton net to collect our samples, and then the next pair collected replicate sediment grabs. We were very happy!
 |
| Baby sea star! Photographed using a dissecting microscope. |
The samples we collected were well worth the effort, because they contained a number of very interesting species. I even found 3 baby sea stars! I wonder if they're the same species as the unidentified larva we found in the plankton samples before, and I look forward to analyzing them more in my lab back home to find out. Our samples demonstrate that at least some seafloor animals are reproducing in the middle of winter, which is a cool result all by itself. I'm so glad we were able to get creative and collect our samples despite the wind!
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