Yesterday was, by far, the coldest day of this mission to date. The temperature was -10 and the wind chill got as low as -40 F. It was so cold that the motor for CTD door stopped working, as did the depth sensor on the CTD. The cold permeated the ship – I could tell that it was going to be cold before I even left my bunk. The passageways, mess deck and lab spaces were all cold. You know it's cold when HOT HANDS don't even seem to get warm!
Meteorological display - check out the temperatures!!
Notice that the temperature on BOTH the Fahrenheit scale and Celsius scale are -40!! The conversion formulas between °F and °C are:
[°C] = ([°F] - 32) × 5/9
[°F] = [°C] × 9/5 + 32
The Question of the day will ask you to look at those formulas again!
Kristina made a comment that it's pretty bad when the Cold Room (the refrigerated lab space where we pick copepods and conduct experiments) is WARMER than the outside temperature! After lunch, we heard “Now – sewage is secured until further notice” over the ships “pipes”. We CAN NOT use the restrooms in the Main Lab area – the pipes have FROZEN!
Board of Lies telling us the sewer pipes - NO restrooms!
We continue to transit through heavy ice. When I was on the Bridge, they called for Main Engine 3...up to that point, we had been operating on 2 of the 4 engines aboard Healy. The sound of the ice screeching down the sides of the ship still amazes me...the ship has so much power. The sea ice in the area we are operating has pressure ridges. A pressure ridge is where two large floes of ice come together. The ice is pushed down into the water. While you can see the ridge on the surface, the majority of it is underwater.
Pressure ridge where two ice floes come together
Today I am going to introduce you to another member of the Science Team. Dr. Krista Longnecker is Research Associate III at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She is a trained biologist, but she is currently working in a chemistry department. Dr. Longnecker has a Ph.D. and a Masters in oceanography and her undergraduate degree is in biology.
Dr. Krista Longnecker, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
The most enjoyable part of her job is the challenge of working on scientific questions where the answer is really not known. The first fun part is figuring out what she will need to do in order to find an answer. The second part is going through the results and seeing how the data fits into the big picture. She recommends that anyone interested in her career field take plenty of math courses and complement them with classes where you get to practice writing. She also told me that not all of science is fun, and there are certainly times that are more tedious than others. But, on a day-to-day basis, she gets to set her own schedule which is a part of her job that she appreciates.
Dr. Longnecker conducting oxygen sampling
As always, I will end this entry with a view of the Arctic winter from the Healy!
Beautiful Arctic morning with full multi-year pack ice
New Vocabulary
Pipes – ship term for public announcement system (PA)
Question of the Day
Work the conversion to prove that -40 degrees F equals -40 degrees Celsius.
Stay tuned as we continue our exciting voyage on the USCG Cutter Healy. Until then...
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever” - Mohandas Gandhi