What was: Day 40 - Ice and High Seas

While for the most part this trip has been fairly calm, occasionally we get some somewhat rough seas. Quite often this doesn't necessarily correlate with a storm, but has more to do with the speed of the ship coupled with the size of the swells. On the worst days, we move through the water like this:







These days can be pretty exciting. Everything in your room and in the labs falls over and rolls around - you can hear your chair sliding back and forth across the floor all night, and worry about your laptop flying across the room.

More often than not, however, the sea has been remarkably calm. We are moving through Baffin Bay to the NOW (north water polynya) along the Greenland coast. It is extremely beautiful.







Other than watching the lovely scenery, we are beginning to work quite a bit more. This includes deploying the rosette for sampling at least twice (for our team) at every station



and releasing the free-drifting sediment traps at every full station.



We currently have a local Inuit representative onboard with us from Pond Inlet. Abraham Kublu is a wildlife observer and in addition to keeping an eye out to make sure we don't disturb nature or hunters, he helps out with some of the science work.



Finally, a photo of "Rock", here discussing the sediment traps with Bernard. Rock is fond of trying to teach ignorant American girls bad words in French and threatening to push people off the boat if they do not sing for him.