Cruising on the Barents Sea

Hey folks, Sam here! It seems I drew the short straw against Felix and I have to write about all the boring academic things we’ve been doing recently. Things have been pretty quiet recently so I’ll try my best.

Only joking, we’ve been having an amazing time! From the 15^th- 21^st of September we took part on the AG-211 Marine Geology cruise - were we circumnavigated Svalbard aboard the Helmer Hanssen. It was a crazy week – I’ll let Felix tell you about all the exciting things that happened when we weren’t doing fieldwork.

The Gravity Corer on deck

As we covered a lot of ground (or sea) aboard the cruise the majority of time was spent between sample locations. Aside from 2 hour instrument watches in the night we both slept pretty well.  Over the week we took a number of gravity sediment cores, multi cores and completed several multibeam surveys over areas of interest. The majority of the remaining time was spent attending lectures or in four separate groups carrying out various lab work techniques to examine each core. My group managed to talk for an hour about a 3m core of mud - which was surprisingly pretty interesting. I can’t say I enjoyed staring at foraminifera through a microscope in heavy seas though! Only just managed to avoid looking like a panda for the rest of the week! 

Felix on Instrument Watch

Luckily 9.15am lectures were postponed the following day until 1.15am – which for many was still a struggle to attend. The next week was spent at lectures given by Prof. Julian Dowdeswell from Scott Polar Research Institute with follow up lab work in the afternoons. Everyone felt slightly land sick at the start of the week (or that was our excuse after the heavy night!). The weather over the weekend was glorious resulting in two great hikes for me. However, today (29th of September), the snow has set in and It feels winter really has arrived. Time to get the ski’s out  I think!

Cheers, Sam.

We had been told that there would be a lot of free time on the cruise and the best advice probably was to bring a book. Unfortunately, one wasn’t enough: within the first five days I had gone through a seven hundred pages and was left with playing cards and looking out for wildlife for the rest of the time. Sam and I spent much time on the foredeck and the bridge, marveling at extraordinary views and sighted a few fin whales, who seemed to enjoy cruising with Helmer Hanssen despite the constant, mind-numbing noise the acoustic devices of the research vessel produced.

On a short detour to Moffen, a small island about 20 miles north of Spitsbergen, we had our first encounter with walruses. Unfortunately, the draft of the boat prevented us from going very close, and thus we didn’t get any great photos. However, thanks to the Arctic Biology Students’ fish trawls during the previous week, the boat emitted a rank smell, attracting many birds that hovered above the deck at an arm’s distance literally begging to be photographed.

The last evening of the cruise, we transformed the lecture room into a movie theatre and watched ‘Shackleton’, filling us with pride on how far British polar research has come since the first attempts during the ‘Heroic Age of British Antarctic Exploration’. And as soon as we were back on land, we found our way into the pub and celebrated the end of our cruise with pizza, beer and whiskey – the  Norwegians’ favorite import from Scotland. The land sickness/hangover (as Sam mentioned) accompanied us for a few days, before we got used to steady ground underneath our feet again. As the night gets far longer than the day now, we have started looking out for northern lights and hope to be reporting of a first sighting of the aurora borealis soon.
-Felix