Here's CheMin!

I guess this would be a good time to introduce the instrument that I'm babysitting. We (my colleagues at inXitu and I) spent the summer building this instrument, so this is its maiden voyage. This version is the latest in a long pedigree of miniature X-ray diffraction instruments that David Blake and colleagues have been working on for the last 15 years or so. A parallel version is the one that has been selected for the Mars Science Laboratory mission that will be launched in late summer, 2009. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena is building that version. Here is a movie of the MSL rover and CheMin.
Overall, we were very happy with the way the instrument performed, but it was nice to have a little downtime to fix small annoyances.

Catching up on work

When we arrived the next morning to the island of Nordauslandet, the weather was quite cold, and it had apparently snowed during the night.


A small party went ashore to investigate a seabird rookery, where lots of birds nest and fertilize the surrounding land. Meanwhile, I took advantage of the break in geological action (and being driven below decks by the cold wind) to get some work done. We had been collecting quite a few samples the last few days, and needed to run them in CheMin and add the results to the expedition database. Here's me drilling a rock to get a powdered sample to analyze:
The stylish purple gloves are to protect the sample from organic material from my hands.

80 degrees north

We pulled out of Bockfjorden in the evening and cruised north. It was exciting to leave the shelter of the fjord and head out into the open arctic ocean, with nothing between us and the north coast of Alaska but the north pole. The seas picked up considerably as we left the fjord, and although it was not rough by normal seafaring standards, I was a little worried about getting seasick, as I've spent a few fishing trips in the Gulf of Mexico feeding the fish. The only solution of course, was to stand out on deck and take the fresh air. Once you're out on deck, you might as well have a sip of aquavit to ward off the chill. So, a small group of us stood out on the deck, getting our sea legs and telling lies late into the evening. We passed the 80th parallel at about 1.30 in the evening, to renewed celebration.

I never did get seasick the whole trip. It was never very rough, although our lab was in the forecastle, and it did get a bit rolly up there at times. Seasickness is a funny thing. I've been sick in 1 ft seas, but fine in 6 ft seas in a 17 foot boat.

Shameless plug

I know you're all breathlessly pressing the refresh button on your browsers waiting for me to upload more pictures. I'll get to it soon, but while you're waiting, check out my other journal, where I convert an MGB to run on electricity.

Sverrefjell

The next day, we hiked up the cinder cone that had been looming over the ship for the last three days. This is a really interesting volcano. It's one of the few places that have ultramafic xenoliths, which are chunks of rock brought up from the mantle as the volcano was erupting. It's also interesting because some of the xenoliths contain carbonates that are similar to those in the ALH84001 Mars meteorite that was the center of quite a stir a few years ago, because some thought it contains microfossils (it doesn't).

A fox(?) vertebra:

It was snowing pretty good at the higher elevations:
The view from the summit:
The glaciers make the mountains very rugged. These mountains are only 500 meters or so, but they look like 4000 meter mountains in the US.

The biologists among us collected samples from an ice cave near the summit

Across the fjord are the Devonian red beds from the day before:

Science!

The next day, we went ashore to deploy the rover on some Devonian age (~400 million year old) rocks. I was part of the "science" group. In a real rover mission, scientists sit in a room in Pasadena and figure out what the rover should do. There are pretty well-established ways of planning what to do and what kind of images and other data to ask for. This was more of a pretend mission to give us all practice in bossing a rover. To make things a bit realistic, we weren't allowed to look at the site where the rover was deployed, so we would have to practice seeing through the rover's cameras. The first thing we learned about rovers is that they're very slow. I had plenty of time to take pictures between strategy meetings
Finally, we finished our last instruction to the rover, so we could go over to the rover area and take in the action.

Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith, and a Polar bear all walk into a bar...

Another AMASE tradition is to dress up like Men in Black, and pose for pictures while holding rifles. This year, we got all gussied up and headed to shore. There were two zodiacs ferrying people to shore. The first zodiac hit the beach, and people began getting out, when Dave Blake in our zodiac, which was about 100 meters back, noticed a polar bear. We all started yelling our heads off and waving to get the attention of the shore party. They waved back. The bear noticed them, and started ambling over. When the bear was about 75 meters away, they finally noticed it, and jumped back in the boat. Morten snapped this picture as they motored away:
Not to be deterred, we landed on the other side of the fjord and had our pictures made.

Glacial G&Ts

One of the traditions of AMASE (Arctic Mars Analog Svalbard Expedition) is to collect some glacier ice for gin and tonic. We pulled up anchor and moved over to a really huge glacier, where there were a lot of icebergs in the water.


I was one of those picked to go out in the lifeboat with Morten and haul small pieces out of the water and bring them back to the ship.

Fisk, fisk, fisk

The ship's crew really fed us well. It helped to enjoy fish. I was in heaven: I counted six kinds of fish at one meal: Smoked halibut, smoked salmon, crawfish (ok, not really fish, but tasty nonetheless) char, caught by Morten of the crew, both salted and baked, and haddock. You could wash it all down with cod liver oil, if you wanted, but I only did that once.

Helicopter ride

I joined the expedition late, so I was helicoptered out to the Lance. It was very exciting.

The beast:
Taking off felt really strange because the helicopter tips forward
Out over isfjorden, which is one of the largest fjords in Svalbard:

A big glacier:
Mud flats below a glacier:
The second half of the ride was above the clouds, but I got this picture just before we passed over the clouds:
We decended through the clouds once we approached the Lance. The cloud base was only 200-300 meters above sea level (lower than the mountains), so the pilots had to use radar to find a fjord to descend into. I took this picture just as we broke through the clouds:
The clouds were at the same level as snow on the mountains:
At last, the Lance:

We flew up the valley a ways to try to spot a polar bear that was near the ship the day before. No luck, though.

On deck: There was a crew filming a documentary for Norwegian television on board for the whole cruise.

Back in civilization

Since the last entry, I have been at sea on board the Lance for ten days, and now have returned home. There was no internet aboard ship, obviously, so I will go back and post pictures and thoughts from those days.

Midnight sun

Yesterday evening I managed to stay up late enough to go for a walk at midnight. Because of daylight savings time, the sun isn't at its lowest until 01:00, so I guess this post should be titled, "1 am sun"

I wandered by the old cemetery, which made news recently as it was the site of an unsuccessful and acrimonious attempt to find genetic material from the 1918 flu pandemic.


I also stopped by the old museum, where most of the interesting stuff was apparently left behind when the museum moved to its slick new digs downtown



Fossils of temperate climate plants are pretty common around here:



The paleomagnetic record here shows that this area has been migrating steadily north from the equator over the last 300 million years or so. These fossils are about 100 million years old.


I also stopped by the church, which is the northernmost church in the world

I saw some things you might expect to find in any Lutheran church


and some that seemed a little out of place:



Near the church is a 24-hour sunclock. There was a bank of clouds covering the sun at solar midnight, but I did see a shadow a bit earlier:

Oh happy day!

Well, this is seriously off topic, but it really made my morning to read that Karl Rove had quit. It's comforting to realize that abuse of power is eventually self defeating.

Longyearbyen

The largest town in the Svalbard archipelago, and my home for the next two days is Longyearbyen. It was begun as a coal mining town, and coal is still important here, although tourism seems to be the biggest industry.

Coal staging area on the airport road
Shetland ponies
The town from the glacial moraine above
The Longyear glacier:

Some Dr. Suess flowers:
The glacial outwash is pretty:

A reindeer. These are much smaller than I expected. I went for a walk up the valley this morning, and saw reindeer tracks, and then finally this guy. The tracks are about cow-sized, but the actual animal is goat-sized. No polar bear tracks though. You're supposed to bring a rifle if you go outside the settlement here. The foot of the glacier is practically in the town, though, so I didn't bother. There are places here in town that rent rifles, so if I go for a longer walk I'll probably bring one.

In transit

I like the window seat. It makes a trip by air go much faster for me to look out the window and try to recognize places below, or just to appreciate the scenery. It's usually not so easy to take pictures out of the airplane window, as they are usually dirty and the sun is often glaring. Regardless, here are some of the better pictures from my trip over.

This is a wind farm in the Sacramento delta, just east of San Francisco.


Lake Tahoe was pretty, despite the recent fires:


This one is a little hard to make out, but it is the town of Wheatland, WY, where my brother John and family live:




Here is one of the sandhills of Nebraska. These hills are sand dunes that have grown grass over them, holding them in place:



Here is the very western tip of Wales:



The Welsh countryside:

The far north of the Norwegian mainland:



And, finally, Svalbard: