Kongsfjorden

Svalbard as seen from Polarstern

Early this morning, Polarstern sat at the mouth of a western Svalbard fjord, Kongsfjorden. Fog covered the tops of the distant mountains, but pure white snow gleamed from their bases. It took me a minute scanning the topography to discern which watery passage was Kongsfjorden and which was the neighboring Krossfjorden. I could recognize some of the mountainous profiles on Kongsfjorden's northern ridge, but we were too far from the more familiar landmarks – Kongsfjorden's twin glaciers, the research station Ny-Ålesund – for me to make them out. Some of you might remember I spent time in Ny-Ålesund in 2015 and 2020. 

This is our easternmost and shallowest station. Researchers on board worked through the night to collect all the necessary samples – bottles of water, cores of sediment, and net tows full of plankton. Being here also afforded the opportunity for a helicopter mission to pick up samples from AWI researchers in Ny-Ålesund. As the chopper returned to the ship and we turned to steam away, fulmars glided around Polarstern. Little auks flapped their bent, angular wings, while guillemots slapped the sea surface and scooted themselves along. I feel such a peace in this place. A ferocity but also a belonging. It is swift winds and still hearts. Pounding waves and long, deep breaths. The energy of the Arctic wilderness contrasts with the calm I feel inside. Svalbard is my absolute favorite place on Earth.

We got another plankton sample back yesterday. The lander recovery went just as expected, and then Kharis and I sorted all the larvae in the lab. It took us about 7 hours, as all the samples have so far, but at least this sample came back in the morning so we got to sort during the daytime. When we finished cleaning the lab about 3 pm, we looked at each other and remarked at how civilized a work day it was.

Probably the most interesting thing from this sample was a large orange blob (well, "large" in this case is a couple hundred microns across). We had been seeing a number of similar blobs in previous samples – some orange, some peach, some white. I had assumed they were ostracod embryos, because I also found what appeared to be a young ostracod with the same approximate size and color. (Ostracods are kind of like a shrimp in a clam shell. They swim around in the water column their whole life, so they're not actually what we're looking for.) We saved the blobs anyway, just in case.

The soft coral specimen

Yesterday, one of the blobs offered us some new clues to its identity. Kharis found it first. She called me over to her microscope to take a look, and I was delighted by what she had found! One of the large orange blobs seemed to have grown fingers. They were clear and hard to see, but there were about 8 distinct projections coming off from the orange sphere, and what's more, the fingers all terminated in a cup shape with little nubs sticking up in a circle. They were polyps! Mini-anemone-looking things, just like all corals, soft corals, and sea fans have. Polyps!

What we were looking at was most likely a baby soft coral. There are two kinds of soft corals in the HAUSGARTEN area (Gersemia fruticosa and Gersemia rubiformis), so it could be one of them. Soft corals are known to have big, fat, yolky larvae that don't travel very far from their parents, so that fits with our observations of the orange blobs. Like all samples we've collected this trip, we'll need to sequence the blob's DNA to be sure, but I'm pretty excited that we might have caught a soft coral larva.

Little by little, we're learning new things about larval biology in the Arctic deep sea. I'm very excited about these samples!