October 23-24, 2019: Patience now, please!
The cruise leader is supposed to design a scientific program and implement it during the cruise. In theory, all fine! What I have learned during the last two days: Patience and flexibility will save you! It was a roller coaster of emotional highs when things worked as planned, and pretty heavy lows when we encountered failures we haven’t calculated for. The sea ice is melting, yes, but it is still there to make a scientist’s life miserable. After a fair share of hassle, I got my happy ending. A great team work on deck managed to work out the second Calypso Giant Piston core (12 m), a gravity core (4 m), four tubes in the multicores, six new gas flares, and a couple of water samples above the gas flares on the northernmost station in our scientific program. I saw plenty of tired, but happy faces during dinner time. The award came after dinner with a beautiful sunset in the Arctic Ocean.
We are now heading south to pick up the Piezometer from our first station and continue the work in our gas hydrate laboratory ( which is not an actual laboratory, but the area in the ocean dedicated to specific scientific work) on the Vestnesa Ridge. People may ask what Piezometer is and why we are having it onboard. Well, I won’t provide you with complicated facts except the fact that the Piezometer is measuring pore pressure changes in the sediment below the seafloor. Still too academic? Well, I will ask the expert Nabil Sultan in our team tonight to explain it better in a later blog.
