Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 12/29/2008 - 14:13
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Oden Antarctic Expedition 08

Jeff,

Happy New Year!!!  We miss you here and are very proud of what you have accomplished.  The videos are great and Laura, I, and the kids really loved the Christmas video.  Hope you recieved my email prior to Christmas sent from school of the Earth Science Gang.

One question (I'm sure you have many questions to respond to) - The ice that is stained a brownish color is from the algae, however, is the concentation of algae(brown staining) uniform throughout the ice in terms of its thickness and spatial distribution?

Wishing you the best,

Drew

Tue, 12/30/2008 - 10:53

Jeff Peneston

Drew,Tell all my friends at LHS how much I miss and think about them too.  Yes, received your 2 thoughtful photos of my colleques and Iwould have responded but my understanding is that the Liverpool email server is still blocking my emails from the Oden.  
Regarding the brown sea ice.  It is not staining.  The diatoms in the ice are that color and live in the brine channels in the ice.  When the Oden breaks through a floe it turns much of the ice over as the 1meter thick blocks are pushed aside and many of them are almost the color of cola on the bottom.  As ultra-clean at the snow and the seawater is, it gives the impression that the ice is “dirty”.  The ice algae is everywhere we go but since the floes consist of layers of frozen sea surface that have been broken, rafted and refrozen a few times, the distribution of ice algae is very inconsistant.  You can see this is the underwater video that appears in the ice core movie I just sent to my journal.   We have drilled 1.5-meter ice cores and seen no algae and then in a core 1 foot away there is a distinct, 30cm thick brown layer about halfway down.  I have seen the algae on ice of any thickness greater than .5 meter and it can be at the bottom, top or middle of the ice.  
One of the most odd things I had to get used to is that the air is below freezing and so the snow on the floes is generally dry.  But, the seawater is about -1.6?C which is slightly above freezing for seawater and so the floes are rotting from the bottom up.  On our lakes back home, the ice melts from the top down as the air warms and it melts the snow to slush first.  
As the bottom of the ice melts, the brown diatoms are released into the sea surface and they join the pelagic algae in a bloom that turns the seawater in some areas to the turbid green color you would expect in an estuary.  Then the ship moves 50 miles and the water is crystal clear again.
I got to spend the day with the seal team yesterday and it was epic.  We climbed down the rope ladder into the Zodiac and took off across the water.  We pushed through ice filled leads and then climbed out onto the flow to track down a seal with cross-country skis.  As I stepped from the Zodiac onto the snow-covered ice it felt like I was stepping from any other small boat onto shore.  Then I flashed back to reality and remembered that we were 150 miles from shore and in the gap between the inflated boat and the ice, the sea was over 2 miles deep.  Then I followed the group as camera man as we raced across the ice to help corner the seal and I watched one of the researchers make a last minute, both feet off the ice, dive through the air to net the seal about 3 feet before it made it to the edge of the floe. You would have loved it.  I had a constant flood of flashbacks to all the episodes of  Wild Kingdom, Cousteau, National Geographic, Croc Hunter, Discovery Channel, etc that encouraged me to pursue a career in science.  It was one of those times when you know you are having a “defining moment” in your life.  It was a melancholy moment to climb back aboard the ship at the end of the day.
I really wish you were here.Jeff