Thank You. No, Thank You

05/13/2009

Story by Helen Fields and photos by Chris Linder

Bering Sea, May 10, 2009 -- In the last 25 months, Live From the Poles has taken photographer Chris Linder to Greenland, Antarctica, the North Pole (well, partway there), the Arctic Ocean, and now the Bering Sea. A lot of people have helped make this trip, and the whole project, so successful.

Since I’m the writer and I write the words, I get to start: Thanks for hiring me, Chris! He’s taken a different writer every time, so I’ve only been on this one expedition, but let me tell you, it’s been great. I got to spend five and a half weeks wandering around a very comfortable ship, asking people about their work and learning new things every day.

Read on about our adventure in the slideshow.

The Bering Sea in the Age of Computers

Story by Helen Fields and photos by Chris Linder

Bering Sea, May 9, 2009 -- In two windowless rooms near the main lab in the back of the ship, four people labor night and day in front of computers. They aren’t out there on the deck in puffy red suits catching krill or moving big pieces of equipment around, but they’re a vital part of the science team. They’re the computer people, and they do a pretty wide range of work, from making sure e-mail gets delivered to organizing data and working with instruments that map the ocean floor whenever the ship is underway.

Read on about our adventure in the slideshow.

Working the 70-Meter Line

Story by Helen Fields and photos by Chris Linder

Bering Sea, May 8, 2009 -- The ship is working its way back towards Dutch Harbor along the "70-meter line"—a line along the sea where the water is 70 meters (230 feet) deep. Most of the science sampling is over now, but the hydrography team is going full blast. They study the water itself: how warm (or cold) it is, how salty it is, and where the nutrients are.

When you look at the ocean, it all looks like water. But water in the ocean is not all the same, and it can actually have structure. For algae to bloom, the water has to be stratified; that means there’s a layer of water near the surface that is different from the layer below, and holds the algae more or less in place. Algae has to be near the surface because they require sun to live; if they sink down into darkness, they’re in trouble. Water can be stratified either by temperature or salinity. The algae don’t care, as long as they’re getting sun.

Detailed physical measurements of the water show scientists what kind of environment the organisms in the Bering Sea are living in. Is it warm? Cold? Mixed? Warm in some places, cold in other places? Too darn salty for comfort? The physical oceanographers on the hydro team are finding out.

Fairwell to the Ice

Story by Helen Fields and photos by Chris Linder

Bering Sea, May 7, 2009 -- Healy’s nose is pointed toward home. We’re stopping every 10 nautical miles to drop the CTD overboard, and sometimes a plankton net, but the rest of the science is winding down and people are starting to talk about packing up their instruments.

From the satellite images showing ice cover in the last few days, it looks like we’ll be in open water by breakfast. Not only are we heading south, back to port in Dutch Harbor, but the ice is heading north. As spring progresses in the Bering Sea, the ice recedes both by melting and with the help of the winds.

The ship has gone in and out of the ice several times over the last five weeks, but this time we’re leaving for good. We on the media team never get tired of looking at ice. We're sorry to leave it behind.

Read on about our adventure in the slideshow.

Krill Have History, Too

Story by Helen Fields and photos by Chris Linder

Bering Sea, May 6, 2009 -- As we grow and go through life, we accumulate evidence of our age. We get bigger. Our hair turns gray. We drive slower. Well, krill are crustaceans and they’re smaller than a baby’s finger, but they’re just like us: they age.

Biochemist Rodger Harvey and technician Rachel Pleuthner, both from the University of Maryland, are collecting krill on this cruise to learn how the little guys age and what they eat. These researchers study lipids, a group of chemicals that includes fats and can be very handy in figuring out an organism’s past. Because krill do not keep scrapbooks.

And lipids can be used to learn more than just a krill’s age. Like an obsessive digital camera owner who takes a picture of his lunch every day, a krill’s lipids carry a history of what it’s eaten.

Read on about our adventure in the slideshow.

Four Square Meals a Day

Story by Helen Fields and photos by Chris Linder

Bering Sea, May 5, 2009 -- The galley crew on the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy has four deadlines a day. At 7 a.m., 11 a.m., 5 p.m., and 11 p.m., hungry crew members and scientists show up looking for meals.

The ship stocked up with a year’s worth of dry stores and packed a huge freezer full of meat the last time it was at its home port in Seattle. The last time fresh fruit, vegetables, and dairy came aboard was at the beginning of April in Dutch Harbor, before the ship left on this cruise.

With a careful strategy for using fresh fruit and vegetables and menus that were planned months ago, the galley keeps 122 people fueled for 40 days.

Read on about our adventure in the slideshow.

Welcome to the Bug Hotel

Story by Helen Fields and photos by Chris Linder

Bering Sea, May 4, 2009 -- Crustaceans come in all sizes. At the top end of the scale are crabs with foot-long legs and tasty lobsters. Down near the bottom are copepods, critters the size of my pencil point. Copepods live in fresh water and in the ocean. They get in your hair when you go swimming at the beach. "They’re an important link in the food chain," says biological oceanographer Carin Ashjian from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution—she’s the chief scientist of the cruise, and head of the zooplankton team. Copepods are food for chaetognaths (arrow-worms), larval fish, bigger fish, seabirds like auklets, and whales. So they’ve got a big job to do, ecosystem-wise.

We’ve already encountered copepods in Alexei Pinchuk’s nets and the zooplankton team’s experiments. That group does a few different kinds of experiments. One is the grazing experiments we saw before, in which they put a few copepods or small krill into a bottle overnight to see what they eat. Another is egg-laying experiments, in which they put female copepods into a "bug hotel"—no kidding, they call it that—to see how many eggs they lay.

Read on about our adventure in the slideshow.

Lions and Ciliates and Dinoflagellates, Oh My!

Story by Helen Fields and photos by Chris Linder

Bering Sea, May 3, 2009 -- Big, flashy animals like seals, albatrosses, and Homo sapiens are all part of the Bering Sea ecosystem. But understanding that ecosystem means looking at critters of all sizes, even the ones you need a microscope to see. The tiniest eaters are grazers like dinoflagellates and ciliates. They’re single-celled animals known as protists. They are more or less the same size as their food source, diatoms and other phytoplankton, but have a variety of clever strategies for eating them.

Evelyn Sherr, a biological oceanographer at Oregon State University, didn’t come on this cruise, but she sent two technicians to run experiments and take samples on the ship: Julie Arrington and Celia Ross. Arrington is a veteran of polar cruises, while Ross’s first research cruise ever was last year at this time on Healy.

The idea of their research is to figure out how fast two different groups of organisms grow: grazing protists and their food, single-celled phytoplankton. These growth rates will help scientists put together a picture of the whole ecosystem

Read on about our adventure in the slideshow.

How the Ship Goes

05/08/2009

Story by Helen Fields and photos by Chris Linder

Bering Sea, May 2, 2009 -- How does the icebreaker Healy go? Like a car. It’s got a throttle for a gas pedal and a wheel for…a steering wheel. It also has an engine – actually, four. And it goes through water, so instead of wheels it has propellers. Ok, my car analogy just fell apart.

Today we’re looking at how the ship moves, from the people who drive the ship up front on the bridge, 70 feet above the water line, to the propellers and rudders under the ship’s rear.

Read on about our adventure in the slideshow.

Sounds of the Ice

Story by Helen Fields and photos by Chris Linder

Bering Sea, May 1, 2009 -- The ice was different today. The ship spent the night heading north, back to the area where we were about two weeks ago. The last few times we were supposed to stop at the ice, there wasn’t a big enough piece for everyone who does work on the ice to get off the ship. Now that we’re back in the north, today a larger group of scientists was able to work on the ice.

Ned Cokelet, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, measures the ice itself as a member of the hydrography team. "Today the ice was much warmer," he says. "The ice was just slightly colder than the freezing temperature of water." He searches for a word to describe the condition of the ice today and comes up with "saturated," then "waterlogged."

The Bering Sea has sea ice only in winter. Unlike in the Arctic Ocean, where some ice lasts through the summer and there are areas where multi-year ice can stop an icebreaker like Healy in its tracks, the Bering Sea’s ice melts completely every summer. So now, on May 1st, it looks like the spring may be on the way. "The end is in sight, I think," says Cokelet. "The only way it could turn around is if it gets much colder...I think that’s unlikely."

Read on about our adventure in the slideshow.