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.