Note: This journal is being transcribed through communications from the ship to ARCUS.
Location and Weather Summary
Latitude 82 degrees 22.56 minutes north Longitude 120 degrees 35.91 minutes east
Heading East northeast
Friday September 27 at 7:00 pm (we did one more time change today, so that is 4 am in Alaska)
Air temp -1.5 C
Water temp 0.3C (note: yesterday’s water temperature was incorrect — something wrong with the sensor)
Cloudy, but good visibility
Air pressure 1014.4 hpa
Water salinity 18ppt
Wind Speed 6-10 knots
Journal
Today we rendezvoused with Polarstern! They left Tromso last Friday night, but we were delayed by about 12 hours to wait for a delivery of important equipment that had sort of stalled somewhere in between where it was shipped from and Tromso. This put us about 12 hours behind Polarstern. Then we adjusted our course to avoid the worst waves and winds from a storm. So even though Federov is a little faster, it took us 6 days to catch up. But we finally did. This morning, we woke up to see Polarstern on the horizon in the distance!
Polarstern in distance. Photo from Instagram #MOSAiCexpedition.
They are recovering 4 moored buoys that measure seismic activity on the ocean floor. Meanwhile, the cruise leader from Polarstern (Markus Rex) and a handful of other people came to the Federov via helicopter this afternoon. They had a meeting with the cruise leaders and Russian ice observers to plan the next steps of locating a suitable ice floe to moor the Polarstern to.
A funny tidbit is that the Polarstern is only 10-20 miles away, but their clocks read 2 hours different than ours! Because time zones are narrow this far north, we keep having to switch ahead on a daily basis. Today, just to keep up we switched at midnight and again at 4 pm. But Polarstern has been switching sooner than we have, so they were 2 full hours ahead at noon today. This means that their helicopter left Polarstern at 2:30 pm (their time) but it arrived here a little before 1 (our time)! We could see it the whole way! And they left here at 3 pm our time - before our afternoon tea time - but got back just before dinner on Polarstern!
Tonight, we head east a bit in the new ice and open water and then we’ll turn north into the thicker ice. We are going to scout out a good floe for the Polarstern to moor to while they finish collecting the buoys.
Also, you can add that above a certain latitude (maybe you know what it is) the ship’s captain gets to set the time zone. Sometimes in the winter or summer they just pick one time zone and stick with it — not switching as often as we are right now. However, because daylight is so critical to setting up all of these operations, it is important that we keep the ship’s clocks fairly attuned to the daylight. As we traveled east the window of daylight would have shifted more than an hour earlier each day! So we switch time zones to try to keep up!
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