Saturday turned out to be a beautiful, sunny Arctic September day! We had enough time for a short ice station and stopped at an ice floe for a couple of hours. In the evening we returned to the ice floe to retrieve the buoy. When the equipment was safe on board again we could start the journey back to Longyearbyen.
There was a lot of activity on the sea ice yesterday. A big part of the scientific scope of this expedition is to study the physical and mechanical properties of sea ice and icebergs. The different research teams were busy studying ice ridges, measuring ice friction and turbulence, performing borehole jack tests and so on.
Oh, and we had a visitor this morning. We have basically been still during the night and early in the morning a passing polar bear decided it wanted to check out the icebreaker. It was hanging out nearby for a while, waiting for something interesting to happen, but left as soon as we started moving again after breakfast.
Yesterday we started seeing somewhat thicker ice and even some icebergs. Oden pulled up right next to one of the bigger icebergs. Researchers from UNIS decided it was a good opportunity to laser scan the iceberg and quickly had to set up their equipment on deck. With the laser scanner it's possible to create a 3D point cloud overview of the part above the water surface and estimate the iceberg's size and shape.
We arrived at the second mooring deployment site around breakfast time this morning. The deployment went well and we are now on our way to the third mooring site - about 60 nautical miles to the northeast.
Around 01.00 in the morning we entered the ice for the first time on this expedition. At the moment it's mostly random ice sheets in various sizes that are drifting by. We're still on our way to the first mooring line deployment site and our estimated arrivaltime is around 17.00.
The Oden Arctic Technology Research Cruise left Longyearbyen, Svalbard, yesterday evening. At the moment we're heading west towards the east coast of Greenland, where we will deploy four IPS/ADCP mooring lines. Then we're going into the ice.
