GEOTRACES 2015 Arctic Expedition

Coordinates: 46^o 48’ N 72^o 12’ W

We’ve finally met the ship!

The Amundsen in port below the Plains of Abraham.

After our first sleep onboard last night, we’ve begun the process of loading the ship for the expedition. This is officially called mobilization, and it will take three days. During it, we will set up all the scientific equipment, while the crew organizes everything else we’ll need for our time in the Arctic, from canned fruit to machine oil. The crew are mostly Québecois and the scientists are from all around the world, so there’s a pleasant mix of languages to be heard as we shift our many boxes back and forth along the decks. During the previous months, we’ve sent countless emails to coordinate laboratory space between the different research groups, and now the challenge is to realize plans we made with only theoretical floor plan drawings as a guide. In short, we’ve spent today moving boxes.

A small part of the ship’s floor plan, incuding the potato room, which we later found – it’s indeed full of potatoes.

Cranes lifting pallets back off the ship.

We’ve also taken some time to get to know the ship itself, and the second officer kindly gave us a tour. It’s quite a large vessel, with three sleeping decks, and I’ve gotten lost plenty of times just finding the bathroom. Tomorrow, we’ll go on a quick test sail to test the anchor winch, but for now, we’re winding down for the evening.

The Forward Filtration lab in the process of setup.

Scientists coordinate incubation tank building.

Coordinates: 46° 48′ N  71° 15′ W

One of the things I’ve noticed in the months we’ve spent preparing the expedition is that a large portion of the time is spent trying to solve very specific, and often very convoluted, logistical problems. Personally, I currently have a bit of a Scottish problem. Part of my research uses an enzyme that converts one sulphur compound into another compound so that it can be analyzed. Said enzyme is only produced in two laboratories in the world, both in the little seaside town of Oban, Scotland, and one of them recently stopped producing it. Because of this, I’ve spent a lot of time over the past three weeks calling Scotland in the middle of the Vancouver night to try to coordinate delivery of the last remaining vials.  This is a non-trivial problem, because the enzyme has to stay frozen, so it ships on dry ice, which is a hazardous material. This makes it very tricky to get it through customs, especially when it’s a customs office on the other end of the country from me. Our lab has received a lot of very gracious help from our colleagues at Université Laval and both Scottish labs with this project, but despite our best efforts, one of the two shipments melted during transit. The other was simply lost by the courier company, TNT. We shall see what that means for my science plans. Though I’m bit disappointed, all around me, people are grappling with their own, similarly specific and convoluted problems, and in any case, at least I got to chat with a pleasant Scottish lady at 3 in the morning.

Enzyme complications notwithstanding, my labmate Nina and I have arrived safely in Québec City, and have spent the past two days wandering the city, meeting with friends, petting strangers’ dogs, remembering lost French, and drinking considerable amounts of Dieu du Ciel! beer. It’s been supremely lovely, and we’re pretty glad to have some days days of leisure before heading up to the ice. Tomorrow evening, we meet the ship.

Nina and I spent a solid 45 minutes today picking out these buttons.

Coordinates: 49.25 N,  -123.25 W

There is a very large pile of boxes in the basement of one of the buildings of the University of British Columbia. The pile keeps getting larger, and several groups of people are milling about the pile, adding things to it, duct-taping parts of it, labelling it, and stacking parts of it on other parts. It’s a very important pile, and we’ve been working on it for months. This is the pile of scientific equipment that we are taking to the Arctic Ocean this summer. Today, after long preparations, we are ready to ship our pile across the country, to Québec City.

On July 10, 44 scientists from 14 institutes (and a hard-to-pin-down number of countries) will set sail from the port of Québec City on board the Canadian icebreaker the CCGS Amundsen on a summer-long research expedition to the Canadian Arctic. The expedition is part of the GEOTRACES program, which generally aims to better understand the distribution of trace elements in the ocean. In addition to conducting trace element studies, many of the participating scientists do research in other fields as well. Together, we’ll be looking at things like phytoplankton, climate-active gasses, and ocean acidification – trying to discover the unknown in the furthest reaches of the north.

For now, however, we are looking at this rather formidable pile.  The amount of logistics involved in a research expedition is staggering, and even with nested to-do lists, we are almost overwhelmed. We have expensive and fragile instruments with involved acronyms (PFPD – Pulse Flame Photometric Detector! FRRF – Fast Repetition Rate Fluorometer! MIMS – Membrane Inlet Mass Spectrometer!) , but we also have large quantities of much more mundane things that cannot be forgotten: pipettes, gas-tight bolts, rubber boots, notebooks, computers, toolboxes, and veritable mountains of glass and plastic sampling bottles. This provides a challenge: if we forget anything, we will have to sail without it, potentially jeopardizing our research.  There will be many challenges ahead, but for now, the one to focus on is this pile.

Expedition scientist Nina Schuback tends the pile.

Boxes stacked on boxes, which are stacked on more boxes.

A quick introduction at the end: My name is Tereza Jarníková, and I am a graduate student in Dr. Tortell’s research group at the University of British Columbia, where I do research on climate-active gasses. On this blog, I will be writing a sort of ship’s diary for the CCGS Amundsen’s 2015 expedition, documenting our journey north. Through this blog, I  will also be relaying messages to the ship – we would be glad to hear from you! Would you like to ask us questions about our research, the Arctic, life on board an icebreaker, or anything else? You can send words to the Arctic here. Please do! It will be exciting to hear from the outside world.