NAICEX--On the Ice

Happy Sunday friends!



IceKid 2A's first time on sea ice



After losing an hour somewhere in the middle of the night (totally spaced Daylight Savings Time), we woke up a little late, made some muffins and biscuits and got ready to head out on the ice! Chuck and Morgan were especially excited as this was to be their first time out in the field. IceKid - 2A was taken out to a remote piece of ice just shy of the edge, near open Arctic waters.

 

Hole drilled for the hydrophone

We cut an eight inch hole about four and a half feet deep to place the hydrophone (underwater microphone to record the sounds of the ocean; ice movement to whale songs) into the water. It was an exciting first deployment, but more troubleshooting needs to be conducted before the final deployment on Wednesday.

Our team deploying the hydrphone

The other group consisting of Prof. Henderson, Molly and Dagmara and UD students were laying out the one of the survey lines. The lines are going to be used by the NRL (Naval Research Lab) that will be flying over them on Tuesday in their Twin Otter turbo-prop plane collecting the snow data. "Ground troops" measure the real snow depth along those lines to validate NRL's data. Prof. Henderson walked in a straight line for 600m measuring snow depth with the magnaprobe and a few people behind her were marking 25m increments with whippy flags. In the center point, where the lines cross and where we set up the base for our experiment with the heated tent, Molly, Dagmara and Tracey DeLiberty (UD) were guiding Prof. Henderson using the laser tape. 

Is Chuck a new bear guard?!

After that quite rich in data, but not very eventful, early afternoon, we all went to check on the IceKid. You can imagine everyone's excitement when we saw little heads popping out from the water and watching us. A whole bunch of seals came over to see what all those bundled up people were doing on their ice!

SEALS!!!