One day.
"No matter how long you spend in the Arctic, it is exactly one day."
- Hope Jahren in Lab Girl
You want to know what is the most jarring thing after spending a month in the Arctic in summer? Darkness. We're not even that far south yet, but the dim evening light feels really weird. If each day is marked by a cycle of the sun, then this expedition has been one loooong day.
We are steaming south to Germany now, and I get to look back on a challenging but successful cruise. The sea ice this year was glorious to behold, but it also made our research much more difficult. We had to adjust the plan so many times and were occasionally reduced to deciding hour-by-hour what comes next. I'm pretty sure the chief scientist is going to sleep for a week when he gets home.
This cruise, I experienced a rite of passage: losing gear in the ocean. I've been on ships plenty of times when things have gone wrong – heck, I was on the cruise when Nereus was lost – but this is the first time the lost gear was mine. It's a different feeling – much more panicked, much more personal. But the thing I always come back to is that if this research was easy, someone would done it before, and I wouldn't need to be here. We are out here trying to collect, observe, and measure what nobody has ever collected, observed, or measured before – that's science. And besides, I love the challenge, even if it means I have to fail sometimes. If this were easy, I would be bored.
I was going to list off the highs and lows I've experienced during the expedition, but looking back, the only low I could think of was losing the larvae lander. It was rough – obviously. But it was one event.
In the meantime, there have been plenty of highlights. For starters, we didn't have to worry about the coronavirus or even think about putting on a face mask for 35 glorious days. We saw 5 polar bears, a solar eclipse, seals, walruses, and whales. We used a 13-hour transit between stations to grill out on the deck and watch the ice go by. We got some amazing larval specimens and plenty of growth off of the moorings. We found Dropstone Island.
If I were to draw a Venn diagram with "samples I wanted" and "samples I got," the intersection of the two would be very small. But you know what, the "samples I got" circle is pretty darn large – we got up to vial number 336. There's a lot of information in those samples, and I'm pretty sure I even have enough for a publication about larval dispersal in the Fram Strait. Sometimes, thing don't go as planned, but we figure out ways to push forward anyway.
I am grateful to Captain Schwarze and the Polarstern crew for supporting our science and all that it required. I am so thankful for my collaborator, Thomas, who keeps inviting me back on Polarstern and my AWI colleagues who make the trips worthwhile.
Farewell, Arctic. I will see you again soon.
- Hope Jahren in Lab Girl
You want to know what is the most jarring thing after spending a month in the Arctic in summer? Darkness. We're not even that far south yet, but the dim evening light feels really weird. If each day is marked by a cycle of the sun, then this expedition has been one loooong day.
We are steaming south to Germany now, and I get to look back on a challenging but successful cruise. The sea ice this year was glorious to behold, but it also made our research much more difficult. We had to adjust the plan so many times and were occasionally reduced to deciding hour-by-hour what comes next. I'm pretty sure the chief scientist is going to sleep for a week when he gets home.
This cruise, I experienced a rite of passage: losing gear in the ocean. I've been on ships plenty of times when things have gone wrong – heck, I was on the cruise when Nereus was lost – but this is the first time the lost gear was mine. It's a different feeling – much more panicked, much more personal. But the thing I always come back to is that if this research was easy, someone would done it before, and I wouldn't need to be here. We are out here trying to collect, observe, and measure what nobody has ever collected, observed, or measured before – that's science. And besides, I love the challenge, even if it means I have to fail sometimes. If this were easy, I would be bored.
I was going to list off the highs and lows I've experienced during the expedition, but looking back, the only low I could think of was losing the larvae lander. It was rough – obviously. But it was one event.
In the meantime, there have been plenty of highlights. For starters, we didn't have to worry about the coronavirus or even think about putting on a face mask for 35 glorious days. We saw 5 polar bears, a solar eclipse, seals, walruses, and whales. We used a 13-hour transit between stations to grill out on the deck and watch the ice go by. We got some amazing larval specimens and plenty of growth off of the moorings. We found Dropstone Island.
If I were to draw a Venn diagram with "samples I wanted" and "samples I got," the intersection of the two would be very small. But you know what, the "samples I got" circle is pretty darn large – we got up to vial number 336. There's a lot of information in those samples, and I'm pretty sure I even have enough for a publication about larval dispersal in the Fram Strait. Sometimes, thing don't go as planned, but we figure out ways to push forward anyway.
I am grateful to Captain Schwarze and the Polarstern crew for supporting our science and all that it required. I am so thankful for my collaborator, Thomas, who keeps inviting me back on Polarstern and my AWI colleagues who make the trips worthwhile.
Farewell, Arctic. I will see you again soon.
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