Hello there, nice to sea you!
(Apologies in advance for all the terrible puns that will be coming your way, this is what happens when you’re out at sea for too long…)
All is well aboard the Armstrong. Last week we watched a bunch of sunrises, successfully deployed a bunch of drifters, a float and some gliders. Everything went smoothly and we’re seeing some interesting data coming back. We’ll let some of the instruments go off and do their thing and then pick them back out of the water a little later in the cruise.
Glider deployment
Drifter deployment
Right before the weekend we also did some more bow chain and underway CTD sampling on the edge of the Lofoten Basin. The sun was shining and we brought out the speaker, because, let’s be fair, the only way to get through 10h of continuous CTD-ing and manning the winch is with some good, dance friendly tunes. Our funky moves were also captured on the R/V Neil Armstrong twitter feed (check it out here ). We even saw whales and we all agreed it was a pretty good day for doing science.
It’s a deck dance party!
But as soon as the instruments were out of the water we set the course northwest, full speed ahead, to try and get out of the way of some nasty weather. We've spent the weekend hiding behind the island of Jan Mayen who graciously shaded us from the worst of the wind and waves.
Jan Mayen is a small Norwegian volcanic island that hosts a research station, a few glaciers and reportedly pretty good hiking trails. The last time Beerenberg (the world’s northernmost volcano above sea level) erupted was in 1985, but yes, the irony of trying to avoid a bad storm by cozying up next to an active volcano was not lost on us.
It’s still been windy here though, 30+ knots (the bridge reported it was upwards of 50 knots at times) and the SWIFT drifters we deployed as we raced here Saturday later recorded wave heights of around 5 meters, but we got only about half of that.
We woke up yesterday morning to see Jan Mayen covered in snow and the sun shining. The wind and waves still being strong we stayed put for most of the day, admiring the views and getting caught up on emails, exercise, laundry and the like.
The island of Jan Mayen. Mt Beerenberg at 2277m gave us good shelter.
We’ll hang around in this region for a bit, sampling the Atlantic Front Current as it flows along Mohn’s Ridge on its way up toward Svalbard. In this region the Atlantic Water it carries gets modified by waters from the Icelandic Basin and Greenland Sea with lots of interesting large contrasts in surface properties as a result. We’ll also do plenty of deep CTD casts and repeated upper ocean sections to better understand the waters here around Jan Mayen, which is a possible future location for a moored acoustic array that would be part of NORSE. Science!
We’ll sign off with a pretty picture of a rainbow spotted as we were deploying SWIFTs and the sailor pun of the day:
Q: How did viking sailors communicate?
A: Through NORSE code!
Text and photos by Kerstin Bergentz