Monthly Archives: August 2015

Coordinates: 68.58 N, 105.27 W

Well, we’re done, more or less – we’re currently deploying the rosette for our last station of this leg of the expedition. I’ve recorded some of the scientists on board celebrating this (which you can hear above) – despite all the difficulties, everyone’s still cheering for science. We leave the ship in two days, on Thursday, in the Nunavut village of Kugluktuk, after which we’ll disperse across the country – to Québec, to Manitoba, to Nova Scotia, to the west coast. The ship is in full demobilization mode now, and there are once more boxes stacked in the corridors, and we’re once more looking for wrenches. In a few days there will be no more bright cold windy mornings on the bow, no smell of salt, no ice, more night. It seems many of us are looking forward to seeing family/friends/partners/children/dogs and doing very everyday things like eating a salad or riding a bicycle, but we’ll also maybe miss the Arctic, the sounds of the ship, and the endless horizons. I think many of us will also miss the community of kind people that’s developed on the Amundsen over the past weeks – both the crew, with their “certaine fierté gaspésienne” , to borrow a phrase from one of the engineers, and the scientific team, brought together by parallel similar struggles. Right now, the prospect of leaving this island up north to re-enter an urban world of automobile traffic and ever-present advertising seems rather daunting.

But, meanwhile, there is plenty to do before that happens, and, in any case, what feels like a momentous occasion to us really isn’t one at all – several of the scientists are staying on board for the ship’s return trip from Kugluktuk to Québec, and there’s a full team of scientists and crew meeting us in Kugluktuk to take our place. The Amundsen sails waters all around the world all year round – she once passed through the Panama Canal, guided by a local rowboat, which must have been a sight to see – and she’ll be here long after we’re safe and sound and south.

Meanwhile, the expedition portion of this blog is wrapping up. I’d like to sincerely thank my supervisor Dr. Tortell for conceiving of it and allowing me to play with it, and to thank everyone who contributed photos and words, as well as the crew of the Amundsen and all the kind people involved in this year’s GEOTRACES expedition. An extra special thanks goes to our wonderful land-based correspondent, Tortell lab member Robert Izett, who dealt with all the formatting, uploads, downloads, and my sending him bits of media at very slow connection speeds at random hours of the day and night. Finally, thank you for reading about our adventures.

Though the expedition is over, I will be posting several other things to this blog as they are prepared – we brought back some wonderful photos, videos and interviews with us. Watch this corner of the web for an interview with the ship’s captain, a striking video about a rosette, a conversation with an Arctic phytoplankton researcher, and more!

Tereza

The polar bear chose a nice time to visit – right after a very pleasant Sunday dinner (an impromptu acoustic concert accompanied by a few glasses of wine). After all the hope and anticipation, there he was, nonchalantly floating by, curled up on an ice floe, sometimes getting up to stretch, yawn, and walk to the water. It was fascinating to see such a massive beast in the middle of what appears to be a barren landscape, and sad and strange to know while seeing it that these animals, perpetual symbols of the Arctic, are becoming fewer and fewer as the Arctic changes and melts.

Polar bear!!

The wheelmen slowed the motor for a bit and we watched him for maybe ten minutes, and then we both floated onward in opposite directions.

For today’s episode of Expedition Science Special, we’re going to be doing an interview with Dr. Phil Tortell, who’s a professor at the University of British Columbia, who works on dissolved gasses and primary productivity in the ocean. He’s also my boss – I work in the Tortell lab at UBC – and he’s also a Principal Investigator on the GEOTRACES expedition.

Philippe Tortell.

So, to start out with, broadly, could you tell the blog readers what the focus of your research is?

I study a number of questions related to marine primary productivity – that is to say, the production of organic molecules from carbon dioxide and light – that’s the process that all plants do – and we’re interested in knowing what controls the amount of primary productivity in different parts of the oceans, and how that process itself also changes the chemistry of the surface ocean. We’re also interested in studying the distribution of gasses that affect climate, like carbon dioxide, and methane, and nitrous oxide, and we’re looking at how those gasses change across different parts of the Arctic. We’re also really interested in sulfur gasses, like dimethylsulfide, that are produced by algae, and then go up into the atmosphere and influence climate.

So, you have a very broad research focus. Could you talk a bit about what the larger significance of your work is, or how it fits into bigger discussions that are currently being had in the public sphere?

Sure – so, in terms of primary productivity, understanding the rate of primary productivity in an ocean ecosystem is important because it determines the amount of biomass, or material, that can accumulate at higher trophic levels. So if you’re interested in fisheries or seal populations, or whales, the amount of biomass of fish or whales, or any other organism that lives in a marine ecosystem depends upon primary productivity. So understanding how much primary productivity there is now, and how much it may change in the future, when there’s less sea ice, or the ocean surface is warmer, is a really important question for understanding future populations of fish, for example. In terms of the climate-active gasses, the Arctic Ocean is changing quite quickly, and those changes may affect the amount of gas that comes out of the surface ocean into the atmosphere, and changes in the amount of gas could in turn affect what we call the radiative balance of the atmosphere – that is, how much sun is absorbed and how much is reflected, and that could also affect the trajectory of climate change over the coming decades.

What would you say your role is in this specific cruise, and in the GEOTRACES program?

I’ve been involved in this project from the very beginning, even before there was a real GEOTRACES program, at least for this project. Roger Francois, who is the other principal investigator and myself – we are both at UBC and work closely together on a number of different projects, and five or six years ago, NSERC announced that they would fund a number of large projects for climate change and atmospheric research, and we saw this and put together a proposal – he and I did a lot of the writing, and we put together a team from UBC and from across Canada – and we wrote this proposal to try to use that funding opportunity to do work in the Canadian Arctic. So I’ve been involved in this from the get-go, and I am one of the principal investigators – there are about 20 of us across Canada. Beyond that, of course I have specific research projects that involve a number of students, like yourself, so there’s  a sulfur project, a methane/N2O project, and primary productivity. So I’m here on the cruise running several pieces of instrumentation and also helping organize sampling for a lot of different parameters, and I’m also doing sampling for basic things like salinity and chlorophyll and just sort of helping out. So I’m kind of doing a lot of different things.

You’ve touched on it already, but why is the Arctic a particularly interesting place to do the sort of work you do?

Well, I think it’s interesting because it’s changing very very quickly, probably faster than any other –certainly marine- ecosystem that we know of, and those changes are particularly significant, because there are a lot – not in absolute numbers – but there are a lot of people that live here. Again, not a lot of people, but a number of communities, distributed all across the Arctic, so unlike places like Antarctica, for example, where there’s no natural or indigenous population of people, those changes actually affect people’s lives and they affect communities and so on. The other thing about the Arctic is that it is very likely to have very rapid increases in exploration pressure, vessel traffic, and Canada is not in a good position to understand  how the consequences of that are going to influence our shores. So I think we’re really in need of science and scientific information to help us understand why that system is going to change.

So when you’re in the field, in the Arctic, in these faraway, fairly remote regions, how do you practically conduct your research? What does your daily life look like?

Well, when we’re doing the gas measurements, we use automated instruments, and when they’re running well, which isn’t always, we actually don’t have very much to do. We check on them several times a day and make sure the signals are looking good, but they’re really set up to be autonomous instruments, and there we actually spend a lot of time extracting the data and looking at it and actually doing a lot of the analysis on the ship and making sure that we have an idea of what’s going on an understanding the conditions as they’re developing. But there’s also a lot of work that’s based on the collection of what we call discrete samples, or bottle samples, so we put bottles over the side of the ship and collect water at different depths and then we filter some of the water for certain measurements or store others in certain bottles that might get frozen and then there’s certain analyses that we might do. So it’s kind of a lot of different stuff – you’re out on the deck sometimes collecting samples, you’re maybe in your room doing some analysis, you’re in the lab checking different instruments, and that’s actually one of the things I like the most about it – you’re not just doing one thing, you’re moving around a lot.

What would you say is the most challenging about this sort of science work?

The most challenging, as you’ll appreciate,  is instruments that have a mind of their own and can give you no end of grief, and you think you’ve got it worked out, and then you have some problem, and you can spend hours and days sometimes trying to work it out, and it can be anything, from mechanical to electrical, and you’re always on your toes trying to troubleshoot these instruments and trying to make sure they’re giving you the kind of information that they’re capable of doing. So I think that working with the instruments is probably the most challenging.

So, you’ve obviously been going on expeditions for many many years. In your years as a researcher, as a scientist, what have been some of your most interesting realizations, or, if we say, discoveries?

We did a project a couple of years ago at Palmer station, which is a little research station on the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula, so where Antarctica sticks  up towards south America. We had a program where we rotated people through and stayed in total about five months, and each of us spent somewhere between four to eight weeks on station with the sort of instruments I was describing before, measuring things like oxygen and carbon dioxide to follow primary productivity, this process of photosynthesis, and we were measuring basically every thirty seconds for about six months, so we were able to follow, with a lot of detail, the photosynthesis and respiration, or what we call the metabolism, of the plankton of the surface water, as well as bacteria and zooplankton, so little small animals that eat the phytoplankton. And by doing that, we were able to watch, or follow, the development what we call the spring bloom, the annual growth of algae and  photosynthesis in the surface. It was for me the first time I had realized that you can get a lot of information about a system without ever taking a single sample, without ever putting anything in a bottle, and you just have this autonomous little instrument, this robot, that you can just leave out there for six months, and you can learn a huge amount about how the system works, and when there is a lot of growth and when there isn’t. We could see for example whales, when there were big populations of whales that would come through and eat all the stuff and we could see the signature of that in terms of oxygen and CO2. That was a real highlight for me.

Thanks very much. Is there anything else you’d like to talk to our blog readers about today?

Well, you know, we had an interesting, in many ways unfortunate, experience on this cruise being delayed for about ten days in Hudson Bay as the ship got called off of science to do icebreaking and commercial vessel escort. And that experience really drove home for me that as a country, Canada is really not so well prepared for advanced science in the North, while balancing the obligations or responsibilities to do what we need to do to look after northern communities. We have aspirations to be a country that develops its North in a responsible manner, and I think those are good aspirations, but I’m not sure that we’re actually equipped to do that. We talk a lot about it, but I don’t know that we’re ready to do that. I don’t know if we’re ready to follow the changes that are going to happen in the north and make sure we understand that those changes are going in the direction that we want them to. I don’t think that we’re really ready to monitor the changes that are happening in the north.

I think that’s a sentiment that a lot of the scientists on board have been echoing, or discussing, as we sit in the Hudson for long periods of time.
I’ll end with the classic lighthearted question and I’ll ask you to share an interesting or a strange fact about yourself to conclude this interview.

Hm. A strange fact about myself… Well, I was born in France, in Paris, and for the first six years of my life I was only speaking French, totally francophone. Then I moved to a lot of places, none of which had French as a first language, so I lost a lot of my French, and it’s been interesting for me to be on a crew from a ship that is from Québec, where most people mostly speak French and seeing how far my French has slipped in the last three of four decades.

Yeah, the language dynamic on board is really a fascinating one. Thanks very much for your time, and for the interview.

Thank you.

Coordinates: 74.07 N 91.75 W

Today’s location.

On recommence après troubleshoot. Credit Martine Lizotte.

“On recommence après troubleshoot” is something Martine Lizotte, one of the scientists, wrote down in her laboratory notebook after our sulphur analysis robot ran into a problem during a run, but it’s also a pretty good summary of our current situation. In French-English, it means “We restart after troubleshooting”, and that’s been on the order of the day at this station. Our progress was delayed when the cable to the trace metal rosette caught fire and broke (perhaps caught fire is not entirely accurate – I didn’t see it – but witnesses said something about black smoke). Our rather great technical crew fixed it with lots of resin, but it still meant a delay of about eight hours, and as of this writing, it needs to be fixed again. Meanwhile, everyone is quite tired, and there’s a palpable sense of exhaustion, which brings a sort of camaraderie – the type of camaraderie felt by small communities of people facing shared discomfort in remote places. The days blur, because there are no shared sleeping schedules and no nighttime and no external reference points and lots of repetitive work – filling bottles, emptying them, pipetting, sampling, pressing buttons, and the ever-present filtering (filtering seawater is a bit of an oceanography mainstay). Many people are therefore spending lots of time in tiny labs, listening to podcasts and audiobooks as they do the small simple movements that make up the bulk of the work of scientific discovery.

Thomas and José to the rescue! Fixing the trace metal rosette cable. Credit Martine Lizotte.

Our night-crew boatswain Patrick. Credit Martine Lizotte.

Small exciting things happen. The weather remains absolutely splendid, a fact we celebrated with a barbecue on the helideck. We found a sailboat off the starboard port yesterday, and heard it on the radio as well – an unmistakable Euro-French accent on a weak crackly connection asking about ice conditions in Pil-SOOOND – Peel Sound. The fellows on board have sailed to the Archipelago from Brest, France – rather a big thing. It’s remote enough to be in the Arctic on a large expedition icebreaker with a couple dozen very professional sailors, and to in comparison, sailing that far on a tiny sailboat seems somewhat epic. They’ve since sailed off into the horizon, and we wish them well.

Our French friends at sea.

Our bird friend, with a French sailboat in the background.

Thank you for all the questions we’ve received over the weeks! I’ve let a bit of a backlog build up, so several of us have teamed up to answer them all at once.

How fast does the ship go? How many kilometres do you go a day? Where will you end up?

The maximum speed of the Amundsen is 16 knots an hour (a knot is approximately 2,025 yards or 1.852 kilometres ), when she isn’t breaking ice. How far we travel depends on the science schedule. Sometimes we go many hundreds of kilometres a day, but often we spend days on end working at stations and not moving at all.

How does money work? Do you participate in a ship-sized economy while you’re on an expedition?

In general, at sea, we buy very little. Meals, served 3 times a day, are paid for by the expedition budget, and not much else is for sale. The two things we spend money on are alcohol and canteen items. Alcohol is served 4 times a week – 3 times a week at the ship’s bar, which is open from 20:00 to 23:00, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and once on Sunday, when we often have a glass of wine with ‘formal’ (that is to say, fleece-, goretex- and Carhartt-free) dinner. In the canteen, we can buy small comfort items – toothbrushes, cigarettes, chips, chocolate – and also expedition clothes that have the Amundsen on them. It seems that almost everyone on board now has a jacket with the Amundsen embroidered on it – they’re quite nice.

Who cooks?

The ship has a fantastic team of professional chefs. Their names are Gino, Pierre, and Carole, and they’ve been making us wonderful meals 3 times a day under considerable logistical constraints, such as the fact that we haven’t seen a fresh vegetable in weeks. Meals range from mac and cheese to smoked salmon profiterole, and there are usually vegetarian options as well. Sunday dinner is much more fancy than regular meals, and includes an appetizer and a cheese plate. It’s very pleasant to sit down for a nice meal once a week, and some of us look forward to the cheese plate for days in advance…

Does the ship have an Instagram account?

Sadly, no! Our Internet is quite slow. However, one of the ship’s officers is also a cartoonist and illustrator, and she makes rather cool things that she puts on her own Instagram account, which is here [https://instagram.com/emiliesdoodles/] – she’ll likely have her magnificent sketches of the ship on it after the expedition!

How do you dispose of the contents of your sanitary tanks?

The ship generates a good deal of waste and has very efficient ways of dealing with it – no solid waste is ever dumped overboard. Most trash is simply burned in the incinerator. Glass and metal is recycled. The ship’s greywater – used shower water, used cooking water, and the like – is treated in the grey water tank before being released into the ocean from the hold. The blackwater – human waste- is stored in a special holding tank for several days, where it goes through a microbial breakdown treatment before also being released into the ocean.

Which novels are you bringing with you?

To answer this, I did an informal survey of everyone in my immediate vicinity right now:

Clara Hoppe – “[Love and Darkness] by Amos Oz – Growing up in eastern Israel as the son of a Holocaust survivor dealing with a messed-up family. It’s funny and sad and I really recommend it”

Isabel Courchesne – The Last Viking, a biography of Roald Amundsen

David Janssen – “I didn’t have much packing time, so the only leisure reading I brought were scientific articles about beer. This one is called “The Microbial Diversity of Traditional Spontaneously Fermented Lambic Beer.” I wholly recommend it.”

Tereza Jarníková – “Tove Jansson’s Winter Book, which are strange sad funny stories about her life in Scandinavia. I also have Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass, which is probably the best children’s book about the Arctic ever, and also great for adults, and also possibly the best children’s book period. It was the first book to make me excited about the Arctic.”

Nina Schuback- “Future Arctic: Field Notes from a World on the Edge by  Edward Struzik – It’s about ecological and economic changes to the Arctic region. It’s a very interesting book about the Arctic. It’s disturbing.”

Martine Lizotte – “The manual for my gas chromatographer – the Varian 3800 PFPD manual, and the Getting Started Manual. Many times. I also read a lot about Valco valves.”

Is the deck of your boat higher than the upright reach of a polar bear?

Yes – the ship’s main deck is 6 meters above the sea surface. The ship’s bridge -the highest deck of the ship where all navigation happens – is 15 meters above the sea surface. It’s a moot point, though, because we still haven’t really seen a polar bear.

Coordinates: 74.27 N 80.35 W

Today’s location – near Devon Island.

Time is a construct, and there isn’t enough of it. We’re floating off the shore of Devon Island, working through our first Archipelago Station. We’re entirely out of night-time, so it’s impossible to tell just by looking at the ocean what time it is. The sky gets a bit darker and a bit lighter at points, but there is no nighttime, and even if there was, it wouldn’t at all correlate with most people’s bedtimes. Everyone is as usual running on their own schedule, but the schedules are getting more and more frenetic – because of the jaunt to Hudson Bay, we have very little time to do the things we want to do. There are several different times on board. The ship is still on Quebec time, though I believe we’re technically out of that time zone, but more interesting to everyone is where we are on the schedule of science events, but that’s a pretty fluid construct as well, because I believe we are now on what our amazing coordinator Kristina calls “Plan B, version 5”. Furthermore, the GPS and several of the ship’s system are on Greenwich time, also known as UTC – universal time. Since UTC is too long an acronym, the sailors call it Zulu and write it in their logbooks as Z, to differentiate it from Lima, or local time, written L. (My robot also thinks it’s in Greenwich, but several of the other instruments think they’re in Quebec). Bedtime-or, as Kristina calls it, for reasons I don’t entirely know, Pumpkin Time- is the most elusive time of all, as several of us have started existing in an haze of intermittent naps and wakefulness.

Pascal soldering.

Meanwhile, even through this haze, the world around us is staggeringly beautiful. The glacier coming off the island mountains into the sea is sharp and stark and clear, the water is a deep blue, and the cloud form striking patterns in the endless horizon. During the night, around 3 in the morning, we found a copepod on one of the filters that when prodded turned an electric blue – bioluminescence never gets old. It’s a strange and fascinating place to be, here in the endless light, seventy of us on a hundred meter ship with no one else for leagues, miles, kilometres around.

Devon Island glaciers.

The view from the deck.

Coordinates: 72.45 N 55.48 W

Day 28 – Today’s location.

We’ve moved north in the Baffin Bay and are working hard on a deep-cast station. By and large, it hasn’t been an easy one – over the course of it, we’ve had equipment break, plans postponed, and quite a few large and small problems of various types (most of which I don’t even know about). The trace metal rosette winch broke, but the coast guard crew was very quick in fixing it, so we’re able to keep working. We woke yesterday morning to the news that the motor spinning one of the propellers was overheating, which is a rather large problem – there is one propeller on each side of the ship, and if only one works, we cannot sail straight. This delayed all operations for 12 hours while we sat and waited for the Amundsen’s engineers to troubleshoot the problem. As of this writing, the one of the two MilliQ (pure water for lab use) systems is broken, and the other is in a restricted-access zone, leading to interesting workarounds. My instrument had a rough go of it yesterday, as did one of the other underway instruments in our lab – the membrane inlet mass spectrometer – so we had quite a bit to do to try to fix them yesterday.

Dave, Clara, OSSCAR and Josef wait for samples to filter.

Samples ready for analysis.

A propeller shaft spinning – a bad thing to break!

All the small and large breakages notwithstanding, we’re more or less back on track, and headed to the Archipelago tonight, after a hearty Saturday night meal of poutine (One of the particular benefits of a Québecois ship.) We can see mountains in the distance, and fingers remain crossed for polar bear sightings.

The moon pool is a hole in the ship through which we deploy large-volume pumps.

Stefane the boatswain and crew fixing the cable.

The trace metal team leaves detailed correspondence for its collaborators.

…as does the particulate organic carbon team.

Any scientific work that happens on the Amundsen owes a great deal to the men and women of her crew, who work around the clock to keep us safe at sea in the northern ice. Today on the blog, I interviewed the person responsible for the operation of the ship’s engine room – Chief Engineer Abigail Lachance.

The Amundsen’s Chief Engineer, Abigail Lachance.

Ms. Lachance, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to be interviewed. I’m sure readers of this blog are very interested to hear what a chief engineer does on the ship, and what you’re responsible for when you’re on the Amundsen.

As Chief Engineer, I do a lot of paperwork stuff, but I’m responsible for the whole operation of the engine room. I delegate a lot of the hands-on stuff to the senior engineer and the rest of my team of three other engineers, an electrician, and six other assistant engineers, and they take care of all of the operations of the ship, the maintenance, anything that breaks down. The ship is pretty much a floating city, so everything that makes the ship run needs to be maintained, and the ship is quite old, so things break down on a regular basis. So if the lights are on, it’s because we’re doing our job right. If the toilets are flushing, it’s because we’re doing our job right, and if you have running water… All of the things that people take for granted, that’s the engine room department.

That sounds like a lot of things. So, for our readers, could you maybe describe a typical day. When do you get up, what do you do, when do you go to bed?

I can’t really say that there is such a thing as a typical day on the ship, because every day is different. As a Chief Engineer, I work a day shift. I work from 6:00 to 19:30, and anything that goes on in the engine room comes through me, but the engine room staff work different shifts. There is always somebody working in the engine room, and they work shift work. They work four hours of watches, and four hours of what we call conex, where they do the maintenance stuff that they can’t do when they’re on watch, they have a four hour rest, then they do another four hours of watch, and then they have eight hours off to have a good night’s sleep. So, as Chief, I have the nice daytime job, but if anything happens throughout the night, the engineers will call me – if it’s something they’re not sure about, they’ll ask my advice, or if they need my help…I’m on call all the time.

I think all of us scientists are kind of in awe of the ship’s crew, because you guys work so hard and you’re on all the time. When do you get time off? When do you leave the ship?

Well, in a typical summer trip, I leave the ship after six weeks.

For how long?

In general, the schedule is six weeks on, six weeks off, so we work six weeks, and it’s six weeks of twelve hours a day, hard work, and then we have six weeks off, when we can go home and just enjoy our time off.

What would you say is the most challenging part of your job?

The most challenging part of my job…I think, to be honest, it’s the personnel stuff. When we’re away for six weeks at a time, everybody goes through highs and lows, and everybody is living in close quarters, and things come up. People get frustrated and irritated, and people are getting tired. It’s when things like that start to deteriorate – I find that, as a Chief Engineer, a challenging part of my job. How to keep morale up, how to keep people motivated…the engineering stuff, I mean, we encounter problems all the time, and generally we have what it takes to figure out the problem. It’s more the morale stuff that’s the challenging part.

That makes a lot of sense. So, you’re currently in a very high position with the Canadian Coast Guard, and you have a fascinating job. What was the path that you took to get there? What schooling does that involve, where did you start out with the Coast Guard?

Personally, I went through the Canadian Coast Guard College. It’s a college that’s dedicated to training officers for the Canadian Coast Guard. The training we get applies to engineering in general, but there are some specific things that are really dedicated to the Coast Guard in particular. It was a four year program, and I graduated with a degree, and I started out as a junior engineering officer, working alongside other engineers, sort of learning the ropes, and then eventually started working as a third engineer and had my own watch, so I was responsible for specific equipment. The way engineering works, you accumulate sea time, you need to have a certain number of days at sea, and once you have those days at sea, you write another exam and get a third class ticket. When you get your third class ticket you can take higher jobs. And then, after a certain amount of time and experience, you get a second class ticket. With a second class, you can be Senior Engineer, which is just the next step, just below being Chief Engineer. And then, after another series of weeks and months at sea, I accumulated enough time to write my exams to get my first class ticket. With a first class ticket, I’m qualified to be Chief Engineer on any size of ship anywhere in the world. I’m a new Chief, I just got my ticket last year, and I’m the first woman Chief Engineer in the Québec region in the Coast Guard.

Congratulations.

How many years is that? How many years have you been at sea?

I’ve been at sea…I graduated from the College in 1995, so it’s been 20 years that I’ve been sailing. It is possible to go through the exams faster, but there is experience to be gained by sailing at different levels. I wasn’t in a rush to be Chief, so it took me a little while.

So, you mention that you are the first female Chief Engineer in the Québec region, from which I gather that it’s not a super common profession, still, for women today. What is it like for you being a female engineer? Is that an experience you can speak to?

Today, it’s much easier than it was 20 years ago. When I started out as a junior engineer, I was one of three women in the Québec region. I had a lot of guys taking tools from my hands, saying “no, I’ll do that for you”, and treating me like I didn’t know what I was doing. Over the years, the people that I work with have seen me, and see that I know what I’m doing. It took longer for me to get the acceptance of the people around me than it did for someone who graduated the same year as I did. We weren’t seen as having the same abilities. But, over the years, people have gotten to know me, and now it’s 20 years later, and most of the people who I come into contact with know me from my reputation. There are still some people that don’t like to have a woman as their boss in the engine room, and they don’t consider me to be qualified, but it’s 20 years later and attitudes are changing. There are still not many women in the engine room, but I think it’s just a lack of knowledge. A lot of girls just don’t know that this is a possibility.

On that note, when you say that a lot of girls don’t know that this is a possibility, what would you suggest to young girls, or young people, who are interested in this as a possibility? What would you recommend to them, from your position as someone with an extreme amount of experience?

Well, the Coast Guard College is hard to beat. If being an engineering officer is something that interests you, working with your hands, working on a ship, going on a ship, going on the adventures that we go on, doing the engineering, working on all different kinds of equipment, from sixteen-cylinder diesel engines to small little water pumps, to anything engineering and mechanics rated – if that’s the kind of thing that interests you, then I would recommend the Coast Guard college 100%. It’s a four year program, it’s subsidized by the federal government, so everything is paid for. You go to school, you get a salary while you’re there – it’s a small salary, but it’s a salary. All your books are paid for, your tuition is paid for, you’re supplied a uniform, you’re supplied pencils and paper, you’re supplied anything you could possibly need to go to school, and you graduate after four years with a degree and a diploma – the college is affiliated with the University College of Cape Breton – and a fourth class engineering ticket, which is recognized all over the world. You graduate and you start working as an officer right away. If you’re smart, you graduate with no debt. You can get the same program at the marine institute in St. John’s, there’s another one in Ontario, and another one in B.C – similar programs, where you study four years of engineering, but you don’t have the advantage of being targeted for the coast guard, and it’s a university where you have to pay your way through. In my opinion, if you’re looking at that type of career, why wouldn’t you go for free education, versus the one you have to pay for.

Thank you very much for the interview. Finally, I’ll end with a question I’ve been asking everyone that I’ve been interviewing on board the Amundsen. Can you share an interesting or a strange fact about yourself?

Oh my goodness. An interesting fact? I graduated in ’95, I wanted to go sail in Newfoundland, but I got posted in Québec, and I thought, oh, I’ll just come to Québec, and I’ll get a transfer in the next few months. And it’s twenty years later, and I’m still here.

Coordinates: 64.50 N 58.56 W

Our location off Baffin Island.

Finally, a scientific station – Baffin Bay One! The Amundsen was humming with activity yesterday as everyone, in parallel, worked on their research. The station started at 4:00 am and finished at 10:00pm, and there was work to do before and after, so many people were up for more than 24 hours, working on any number of things – trace metal casts, high volume pumps, primary productivity casts, CTD profiles, aerosol sampling… The fish team found lots of copepods and a large jellyfish. Clara finished the first incubation of her ocean acidification experiment. Trace metal concentrations were analyzed – apparently, the instrument for analyzing zinc is running very well, so Dave stayed up analyzing zinc for 24 hours. A thousand other small and large things were done, and everyone was excited to finally, after such a long break, be doing the scientific research they had planned and prepared for, months and years ago, in offices and labs and late-night coffeeshops across the country.

Bongo nets, sampling for copepods and larger animals, being pulled on deck

Marine sews bags for incubation experiments.

A filter full of copepods.

Dave peers from the bubble at the world outside

Nina demonstrates proper bottle handling technique.

Dave’s clean hand.

Meanwhile, quietly, we’ve crossed the Arctic circle. Neptune has been laying low for a bit – probably all the science – but we’ve heard the return of the cackling on the radio, so he’s still out there – maybe we’ll see him tonight.

Coordinates: 62.50 N 72.50 W

Our location – finally getting back on track!

A very quick late-night update – we’re finally, after 11 days of waiting in the Hudson Bay, heading north to Baffin Bay to resume our science program. After so long sheltered from the waves, it’s quite an adjustment to remember that the sea moves, dramatically sometimes. Rough seas notwithstanding, we’re all very happy to be headed north to work again.