Tracking Ocean Changes in the Arctic Switchyard
Arctic ice is declining rapidly—a trend with enormous implications for global weather and climate. Freshwater pours into the Arctic Ocean from the ice sheets and glaciers, and sea ice over the ocean itself is declining. Ocean Channels and currents there act as a kind of switchyard, sending fresh water into the North Atlantic, and small changes here may have larger impacts on climate downstream. To understand these processes, scientists are landing in small aircraft on the floating sea ice, and drilling down to study the water and currents below. Lamont-Doherty researchers Bill Smethie, Ronny Friedrich, Dale Chayes and Richard Perry report on their work here.
Date: April 28-May 18, 2012
Team: Bill Smethie, Ronny Friedrich, Dale Chayes, Richard Perry
Under Arctic Ice: Watch the Video
Click here to view the embedded video.
This video depicts the activities of the LDEO Switchyard field team, which deploys annually and uses ski-equipped aircraft to reach a series of sample sites between the North Pole and Ellesmere Island in Canada.After landing, a hole is drilled through the ice, and the sampling system is lowered through the hole to a depth of about 700 meters. The sampling system (the thin hole rosette) which was designed and built at the Lamont-Doherty Instrument Lab, allows the LDEO field team to examine the water as the assembly descends and to collect water samples for later analysis when interesting properties are observed. This work is supported by the US National Science Foundation.
This video was shot by Switchyard team member Dan Greenspan, who is a researcher at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Check out his blog, and his recent entry: “Traveling to the North Pole, Part 10: Eclipse, with Wolves.”
Final Days in Alert
Time is flying, bringing us to our final days in Alert. We were able to recover samples from 12 stations, which is a great success and the second most successful year on record. Thanks to everyone who made it happen: Dale, Richard and Dan who went out every possible day to collect samples; Al and Jim for their support in Alert and of course our friendly Canadian colleagues..
The next two days are filled with packing and arranging the equipment and samples for their long journey home to New York. We plan to fly out of Alert on May 22 to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland but don’t know yet when the Air National Guard will pick us for the flight to New York. We hope to be home by May 25.
Locations of the 12 stations where we collected samples this season.
A Walk against Cancer
Alert hosted the first northernmost cancer-fighting fundraising event “Relay for Life,” an event sponsored by the Canadian Cancer Society to celebrate cancer survivors, remember loved ones lost to cancer and fight back against all cancers.
Lights to honor loved ones.
The 12-hour-walk was organized by Kristy Doyle, who lost her grandfather to cancer in 2010. Participants raised a whopping $7,580 and collectively walked 900 kilometers. I admit that I feel proud for doing my small part by walking 8 kilometers.
More than 900 kilometers walked in 12-hours
A Visit to Crystal Mountain
The weather has improved considerably and we were able to fly out today to collect more samples. Yesterday, some of us went to explore Crystal Mountain, a 900-foot peak about five miles from Alert that offers an excellent view of the surrounding landscape.
Crystal Mountain at the left.
Ronny Friedrich on Crystal Mountain.
Alert is a Canadian military station located in the far north region of Qikiqtaaluk, Nunavut, Canada–the self-proclaimed “northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world.” There is no doubt that Alert is unique, with its 10-months of snow cover, extremely harsh winters with temperatures as low as -40 degrees C (-40 F) and average summer temperatures hardly above freezing. Alert is named after the HMS Alert, a British ship that spent the winter of 1875-1876 about 10 kilometers east of present-day Alert while exploring the arctic. The HMS Alert was the first ship to get that far north. Alert was settled as a weather station in the early 1950s and at the height of the Cold War became a military base due to its proximity to what was then the Soviet Union.
View toward Alert and the Arctic Ocean. Alert is the darker spots to the left.
Alert is a fascinating place that has seen more than its share of downed airplanes and where the hardships that earlier inhabitants endured are still apparent. Nowadays, life is easier and does not evoke the romantic images of arctic exploration of the past. Sure, the Internet moves at a snail’s pace and telephone-use is restricted to 30 minutes per day, but the food is excellent, and we are warm and dry.
Ice cores…finally
Today I got another chance to go out with team CASIMBO to drill ice-cores. The weather was beautiful with no wind, a few clouds, bright sunshine and a balmy temperature of about 5 degrees F.
The smooth snow and ice in the foreground is the Arctic Ocean "beach" while the rubble in the back is actual sea ice.
When I first saw sea ice near Alert a few years ago, I was very surprised. It wasn’t anything like I had imagined. One might expect sea ice to be like lake ice: smooth and flat. But Arctic Ocean ice is in constant motion, driven by winds and ocean currents. Big chunks of ice break-up, smash into each other and create ice that looks more like a rubble field.
Trying to find a way through the ice field to the sampling location.
As we drove over the icy rubble on our snowmobile, we searched for a route to our sampling location, about 3 to 4 miles away from Alert (45 minutes by snowmobile). Taking an ice-core is relatively simple. One of the pictures shows Ben using the corer. It is basically a plastic pipe with cutting knives at the end that drills into the ice while keeping the ice-core trapped inside. After 3 feet of ice is cored, the corer is lifted out of the hole and the ice core is packed into containers for further processing in Alert.
Ben drilling an ice-core
The ice above was about six feet thick but generally, thickness varies. There is thin ice that has just formed on open water between ice floes, first year ice, or ice that has formed this winter, several-feet thick and ice that has formed over several years that can be more than 20 feet thick.
Ice-Coring…Almost
The weather became increasingly cloudy yesterday with low visibility and snow. That means no flying. The forecast for the next 24 hours doesn’t look promising either. As usual in the Arctic it’s better not to forecast — everything might change within hours.
Getting ready to get ice-cores together with colleagues from University of Alberta.
In addition to the standard suite of samples that we usually take, this year we will take ice-core samples to see how the melting sea ice below is affecting the ice. Our colleagues from the team CASIMBO, at the University of Alberta, have shared pictures of their ice-cores with us.
An ice-core under polarized light showing snow cover on top and ice crystals forming below.
To get a feeling for the amount of work necessary to drill an ice-core, I tried to join CASIMBO out on the ice via snowmobile, but due to the bad weather we had to return to the base. The wind and snow was picking up, and clouds prevented us from judging the condition of snow-covered surface we were driving on. (There are no roads here!) The risk of getting lost was far too great. I wore several layers of clothing, including three pairs of heavy socks, but was still shivering in the cold.
Not much to see in bad weather. Total white-out.
Sampling Water at the North Pole
The 2012 field season started out better than we could hope for. The weather has been great for flying and sampling water below the thick sea ice that covers much of the Arctic Ocean. Good weather means no low clouds or fog to prevent our pilots from seeing where they are going. Unlike regular airplanes that can land and take off in most weather, our planes don’t have the fancy technical instruments such as radar that can peer through cloudy skies. We were able to recover water samples from three stations, including one at the North Pole–a big success since the North Pole is crucial to understanding global ocean currents. The North Pole station is the farthest from Alert, requiring four to five hours of flying to get there, including a stop to refuel on the way and sometimes on the way back. To refuel, we land on the ice where we have have prepared a make-shift gas station several days earlier. The station consists of several drums of fuel and a beacon that allows us to find it on a constantly shifting landscape of ice; the sea ice moves several hundred meters each day. Unlike the South Pole, the North Pole is surrounded by water and so the landscape here looks very uniform. It’s hard to know that you’ve arrived some place special.
To collect our water samples, we drill through up to eight feet of ice and lower a special sampling device into the hole that will measure the water’s temperature, salinity (conductivity) and dissolved oxygen as it descends. Today we are not allowed to fly and so we will spend the day resting and preparing our equipment for the days ahead.
Albany to Alert
Our annual trip to the Arctic starts in Albany, where the Air National Guard will fly us north in a venerable C130 Hercules military transport plane.
C130 Hercules
Inside the C130. No first class here, not even economy.
First stop is Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, where we will stay overnight. Kangerlussuaq (in Danish: Søndre Strømfjord) is a settlement in western Greenland, home to Greenland’s largest commercial airport. As usual, we were greeted by our friendly colleagues from the Kangerlussuaq Science Support Center (KISS) that supports all science operations in and around Greenland. Temperatures are getting much lower than down south at about 40F (5 degrees C). Kangerlussuaq is home to Greenland’s most diverse land-based wildlife such as musk oxen, caribou, gyrfalcons and the Greenland sled-dog.
Me and the Greenland sled-dog.
Next stop is the U.S. Air Force Base Thule in Northern Greenland, where we refuel and head to Alert. On the way from Kangerlussuaq to Thule we fly along the coast of Greenland, over Baffin Bay, where the Arctic starts to show its icy face. For me, Greenland is fascinating for its mild temperatures, diverse wildlife in the south and breathtaking frozen state in the north. I also like the Danish pastries served in the airport cafeteria – it reminds me of home.
Coast of northern Greenland
Finally, we arrive at the Canadian Forces Station (CFS) Alert around noon. Our home for the next few weeks.
Alert
Switchyard 2012: Climate Change in the Arctic
Arctic summer sea ice is declining rapidly: a trend with enormous implications for global weather and climate. Now in its eighth year, the multi-year Arctic Switchyard project is tracking the Arctic seascape to distinguish the effects of natural climate variability from human-induced climate change. The University of Washington is leading the project.
- A) The Canadian Forces Station, Alert
We will fly from the Canadian military base at Alert, Ellesmere Island, land on the ice by ski plane to drill holes, deploy instruments and retrieve water samples. We will measure water temperature, salt content and levels of dissolved oxygen, and a wide variety of natural and man-made substances. Our goal is to understand how much fresh water is entering the system, where it is coming from (sea ice melt, river run-off and so on) and where it exits the arctic, altering currents in the North Atlantic Ocean.
During the next few weeks we will blog from the field; Follow our work on the Arctic Switchyard project page.
Switchyard Project: A Very Successful Year
May 22: The 2011 field season has been a very very successful year, in fact the most successful one we have ever had. The weather has been great, the equipment proved to be mostly reliable, the people have been great and the samples are plenty. In the month to come, we will analyze the water samples and eventually end up with a tremendous amount of very exciting data. Thanks to everyone who made this happen.
Area of operation and sampled stations in 2011 by LDEO (red "o" symbols) and UW (pink "+" symbols). Open white circles show the LDEO stations that we would like to target every year.
We left Alert yesterday and are on our way back home. We are stranded in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, for a couple of days until the Air National Guard can take us and our valuable freight back to the U.S.
Best wishes.
The Switchyard Team.
Switchyard Project: Melting Ice, a Fresher Arctic
May 16: The weather has been great over the past couple of days since our last post, and we could get more samples — 15 stations so far. Today is an exception, with the whole region covered in fog; one can barely see 10 feet away.
Now that we have showed you the way we get samples, we will try to explain what the analysis of the water tells us about the Arctic Ocean and its link to climate change.
One aspect of our research is to understand how the freshwater content of the Arctic Ocean is changing as the Earth’s climate warms. There are three major sources of freshwater in the Arctic Ocean:
1) Meteoric water, which is water input from the atmosphere as rain or snow; most of this water enters the Arctic Ocean from rivers.
2) Freshwater that is mixed with North Pacific water and enters the Arctic Ocean through the Bering Strait.
3) Melting of sea ice.
Using a combination of all the results of our sample analysis, which consists of chemical measurements and tracer analysis, we are able to determine the fractions of these three freshwater sources in a water sample.
Some of the results are shown in these maps. The distribution of the total freshwater present in 2008 and 2009 are shown in Fig. 1. The data used to produce these maps are from our study, including data from our University of Washington colleagues, Mike Steele, Wendy Ermold, and Roger Anderson, and from two other research programs, The North Pole Environmental Observatory and the ice-tethered profiler program. Comparison of these two maps reveals the water north of Ellesmere Island and Greenland becoming fresher (red indicates high freshwater content, blue low freshwater content.
Notably, while the water of the Arctic Ocean became fresher, the amount of meteoric water (mainly river runoff) indicates roughly the same amount in our study area in both years (Fig. 2). Maps of sea ice melt water shows an increase between 2008 and 2009 (Fig. 3) as well as freshwater from the North Pacific Ocean (not shown).
Thus the increase in freshwater content between 2008 and 2009 was caused by an increase in sea ice melt and freshwater from the Pacific Ocean. It is interesting to note that a large amount of sea ice melted in the summer of 2007, and the flow of this water through our study region may be the cause of the increase in sea ice melt-water.
Switchyard Project: New Sampling Record
May 10: We celebrated the sampling of our 10th station yesterday. These are more stations than we were ever able to get water samples from. Because of the ongoing good weather, we will certainly get one more station today, and hopefully many more during the next couple of days.
So watch the posted video and celebrate with us. The video shows Susan, Bill and me sampling one of the cassettes with the water bottles attached to it over period of about 15 minutes.
Switchyard Project: Sampling Success
The past 1½ weeks have been very successful. Our team from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory was able to obtain water samples from eight stations, while the team from the University of Washington has already broken their all-time record of the past years of 18 stations.
Today (May 7) is actually the first day we can’t fly due to the weather conditions, which do not allow safe landings on ice (a lot of low clouds and fog above the ice). This is certainly a very much-needed day of rest, especially for the field teams that go out and get samples.
Twin Otter with tent attached. Sampling happens inside the tent.
Time to describe how we actually do the sampling of water from the Arctic Ocean.
The sampling is a two-step process. First, we need to get the actual water samples from the Arctic Ocean, and second, we have to sample that particular water and put it into sampling containers for further analysis.
Step 1 is certainly the much more elaborate and straining part. When weather permits, an airplane (a Twin Otter) especially suitable for operating in the Arctic will take part of our team, two to three people, to one or two locations per day where we would like to get water samples.
Dale, Richard and Ryan setting up a tripod inside the tent to operate the CTD-rosette
After landing on the ice, we drill a 12-inch hole through the ice, which can be as thick as 7-8 feet. In order to get water samples, we have designed a special sampling device – a so-called lightweight CTD-rosette. The rosette holds a cassette with the CTD sensors and three cassettes of four sampling bottles – so called Niskin bottles, with a volume of 4 liters each.
The whole package is lowered through the 12-inch hole into the water to depths as deep as 800 meters, while the CTD sensors record and monitor temperature, salinity (conductivity) and dissolved oxygen of the water on the way down. These data already reveal some of the features in the water column that we are interested in, such as regions with strong signatures of freshwater, Atlantic water or Pacific water.
On the way back up to the surface we close one of the bottles at a time at each of the depths that are of particular interest for us. This will isolate and capture a portion of the water in order to bring it back to the station. The whole procedure on the ice needs about 3 to 4 hours. Don’t forget that the time to get to the sampling locations can be as long as 5 hours one-way.
Step 2 takes place in Alert, where we have set up a little laboratory. The rest of our team has already prepared a large number of sampling containers and is awaiting the arrival of the field team. As soon as the water samples arrive (which is usually later afternoon or at night), we fill water from each of the 4-liter Niskin bottles into smaller containers of various size and type (plastic bottles, glass bottles, metal containers). We take 120 samples for each of the locations our field team was able to reach.
Some of the large number of samples are actually being analyzed right here in Alert in our little lab within the next few days by Susan (salinity and oxygen samples), while most of the samples have to be shipped back to Lamont-Doherty.
Three cassettes with four Niskin bottles attached to each.
Switchyard Project: Rescue Operation
4 skiers rescued
May 4, 2011: Today we have realized again how dangerous life can be in the high arctic. We assisted in a little rescue operation of four people who tried to ski from the North Pole to Greenland. They got stuck on the ice and ran out of food. Since our team was out on the ice for sampling close to their location, we stopped sampling and picked them up.
Sea ice on the Arctic Ocean moves around: Huge sections of ice can drift a few miles a day, up to 15 miles a day or even more depending on the wind conditions. Apparently the unfortunate skiers had to fight against the drift that moved the ice away from Greenland, and 15 miles a day is a long distance to travel, especially in areas where the ice is cracked and open water is present. Everybody is safe and healthy.
Number of sampled stations overall:
LDEO: 6
UW: 13
Switchyard Project: It’s all about the weather
Our daily routine usually starts around 6.30 a.m. with checking satellite pictures of the area around Alert up to the North Pole. Since weather forecasts virtually don’t exist here, satellite pictures are the only reliable way for us to see what the weather is like and will be like in the next few hours in the area where we want to take samples.
Having no clouds, no fog and low temperatures above the ice is certainly the perfect set of conditions that we are looking for. Since these conditions are rarely found everywhere in our area of operation, we have to pick spots where we think reasonably good conditions are likely to persist until we can get there with our planes.
Good weather conditions: clear sky, no fog and only a few high clouds
To make it even more complicated, it’s not just about the weather above the ice. The planes also have to come back to Alert again and need to have a reasonable amount of visibility to be able to land on the icy and snowy runway.
One can only imagine what kind of a pilot one has to be to fly in the arctic regions and land on sea-ice under weather conditions as we have experienced already – fog above the ice and clouds covering the area with very low visibility. They have to be very experienced in judging the condition of the sea-ice, whether or not it is thick enough to land on (but not too thick), and whether or not there are any cracks in the ice or bumps underneath the snow cover. Therefore, good weather and visibility is one of the most important and most limiting factors of our operation here in Alert.
Bad weather conditions: Although the sky is clear, the sea-ice is covered with fog so we can't see the ice at all.
In that period when arctic winter has come to its end and arctic summer is starting, the environmental conditions are changing fast. Till a few weeks ago, Alert was in the grip of very low temperatures of about -30 degrees C (-22 F). We arrived a week ago at -20 degrees C (-4 F) and are currently seeing temperatures around -10 degrees C (14 F). With increasing temperature, ice and snow are melting, and the sea-ice cover is breaking open. Open water without ice coverage releases a lot of moisture into the atmosphere, which will become eventually visible as fog and clouds. The further we move into the season, the more days with bad weather we probably will experience.
However, so far the weather has been great, and we could fly out for most of the time. Our team from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is as I’m writing this at the North Pole, our furthest sampling station away from Alert.
Bad weather for flying but very very beautiful to watch.
Number of sampled stations overall:
LDEO: 4
UW: 10
Switchyard Project: Day 1 – Alert, Alert, Alert
The first day of our operation is usually filled with a lot of work preparing and testing the instruments we brought up here, preparing the airplanes, loading our equipment into the planes, setting up the equipment in the laboratory and preparing the sampling containers. Since our operation requires drilling holes through the sea ice, we did a little test with our new drilling equipment today to see whether it is working under actual conditions. So, we are ready to go tomorrow and hope that the weather will be good enough to fly. More details about the way we actually get samples will be coming later in this blog.
Richard and Ryan during prep work
Meanwhile, it probably would be good to tell you about the place where we are staying for the duration of our project – it is a military station called CFS (Canadian Forces Station) Alert. Alert is located far north in a remote region named Qikiqtaaluk (no that’s not a typo), Nunavut, Canada approximately 800 km away from the geographic North Pole. Alert claims to be the “northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world.”
Given the climatic conditions, there’s no doubt about the uniqueness of Alert, which has snow cover for 10 months of the year, very harsh winters, with temperatures as low as -40 degrees C (-40 F) and average summer temperatures hardly above freezing. Alert is named after the HMS Alert, a British ship that wintered around 10 km (6.2 mi) east of the present location of Alert in the winter of 1875 to 1876 during its arctic exploration work. In that year no other ship had ever been further north than the HMS Alert.
Alert was settled in the early 1950s as a weather station and soon became a military station, due to its proximity to the Soviet Union. Rumors are saying that Alert may be closer to Moscow than Ottawa (it’s up to the reader to verify it and let me know whether or not this is actually true).
Alert is a very fascinating place with lots of stories about crashed airplanes, the cold war and the hard life at the station in the early years.
Nowadays life is certainly not as hard as it has been during its settlement and doesn’t even come close to the stories of early arctic explorers that everybody knows about. Sure, internet connectivity is very very slow, using the telephone is restricted to 30 minutes per day, but the food is excellent, it’s warm and dry, and the Canadians can even watch live hockey matches on TV.
Me standing in front of the Alert sign.
If you want to know more please check-out these web pages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFS_Alert
http://www.jproc.ca/rrp/alert.html
Number of sampled stations today and overall (in parentheses):
LDEO: 0 (0)
UW: 1 (1)
Switchyard Project: In Transit…Part 2
April 27, 2011: We spent the night in Thule in the North Star Hotel. Before we could leave Thule the crew had to load the cargo back into the C130. Equipment is loaded onto palettes, and these palettes are loaded through the rear door into the plane. A C130 can handle four palettes with two tons of cargo each.
The flight to Alert is only about 1 1/2 hours long flying along the Nares Strait, with some very beautiful views of the Greenland ice sheet extending to the coast. The following picture shows the edge of the ice sheet.
Edge of the Greenland ice sheet
We arrived in Alert at 10.30am, unloaded the airplane and started setting up the laboratories and workshops.