http://www.dri.edu
	Spring 2006

Breaking the ice:

Dr. Glenn Berger collects mud and sand, called dirty ice, from beneath a protective skin of ice on a tilted ice floe. Dirty ice occurs randomly, and is uncommon in the Arctic Ocean. Most of this dirt has been carried on the ever-drifting sea ice to the central Arctic Ocean from the coast of Siberia.

To the North Pole and beyond, bringing the public along for the ride

Story by Sara Marcus
All photos provided by Dr. Glenn Berger

Scientists all over the world get to go on expeditions to places thought of as exciting, dangerous, remote, exotic and even mysterious. When these scientists return home and talk about their trips, it may seem as if adventure was lurking around every corner. However, have you ever wondered what happens during the routine portions of collecting data on a scientific journey, or what the day-to-day life is like? Imagine being able to journey across the frozen Arctic Ocean with a group of international scientists—including DRI’s Dr. Glenn Berger—on board the icebreaker USCGC Healy. You would be able to ask why they are going to the top of the world, observe what happens on board the ship and learn about routine workings of a scientific team, not just hear about the adventures. Over the summer, the public—especially students—was able to do just that by taking advantage of an outreach program giving access to scientists and a K-12 teacher on board the Healy.

The icebreaker USCGC Healy went on two separate trips this summer—called HOTRAX (Healy-Oden TransArctic Expeditions) Leg 1 and Leg 2—to the ice-filled Arctic Ocean. The true adventure to the scientists on the Healy was being able to take samples and map features in the Arctic Ocean—the bottom of which, to geologists, might as well be unknown. HOTRAX Leg 1 was a shorter journey of about two weeks, with scientists taking sediment cores from the ocean floor north of Barrow, Alaska. These cores consist of layers of mud and clay from the sea floor that will be analyzed to determine what Earth’s ancient climate was like. In HOTRAX Leg 2, an eight week journey, the Healy crossed the entire Arctic Ocean, traveling from Alaska to the North Pole, finally docking in Norway. The Oden—a Swedish icebreaker that also was conducting a science mission—met up with the Healy on Leg 2, and together, they surveyed the Arctic Ocean from near the pole to Spitsbergen ( Svalbard). On the second leg, more sediment cores were taken for paleoclimatic studies, and high-resolution geophysical surveys were performed in order to map the floor and sub-bottom of the Arctic Ocean. Both HOTRAX legs will help scientists determine how the Arctic Ocean formed and evolved through time.

On each of these two scientific expeditions in and across the Arctic Ocean, a K-12 teacher accompanied the scientists and crew on board the Healy. Along with some of the scientists on board, the teachers posted journals and pictures, answered emailed queries over the Internet, and, occasionally, answered live questions via satellite-telephone conferences. Sponsored, in part, by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the teachers and scientists on the Healy are part of a larger outreach program designed to draw attention to the Arctic region, an area that is starting to be affected by global warming. Thanks to this NSF-sponsored outreach effort by the scientists and other people on board the ship, answers to questions that people had about life on the Healy, her science missions or even climate change on Earth were only as far as a mouse-click away.

The Swedish icebreaker Odin, in front, breaks a path for the USCGC Healy. The path is typically full of broken ice.

DRI aided this outreach effort by placing a story about the Arctic expeditions on the DRI website along with links to the HOTRAX website and Berger’s research website. On Berger’s page, more information about the expeditions and their missions was provided, as was a link to ARCUS (Arctic Research Consortium of the US)—an NSF-supported program that disseminates information about the Arctic—where the teacher and/or scientists on the ship could be asked questions. The HOTRAX link directed web browsers to an external Internet site set up just for following these expeditions, where information was posted about the Healy’s trips, journals kept by scientists on board could be read and the position of the Healy could be tracked as she made her way to the North Pole and beyond.

Dr. Glenn Berger, in the core lab on the USCGC Healy, prepares to split one of the many segments of the long cores obtained on the cruise.

Berger’s main science role in both of the HOTRAX expeditions was to be the operator of a multi-corer, an instrument that Berger says “looks like a 3-meter tall spider.” A multi-corer collects up to eight half-meter-long cores at once, bringing cores of sediment from the ocean floor up to the surface in tubes that keep the very fine mud and clay layers intact. In addition to the multi-corer, a device called a jumbo piston corer, which can obtain cores up to 15 meters long, also was used. Berger says this expedition is the first to obtain such long records from some major parts of the Arctic Ocean, and “we might even have obtained records of climate change going back more than one million years.” Berger adds, “This [date] is only an estimate; actual dating must be done later in laboratories,” which will happen, in part, at DRI. Some of these cores—taken in special, opaque tubes—will be brought to the E.L. Cord Luminescence-Geochronology Laboratory at DRI for Berger and his team of researchers to determine the actual age of these sediments.

In addition to coring, Berger reports that on Leg 2, he interacted with Ute Kaden, the K-12 teacher from Texas who was on board the Healy as part of a science-education outreach effort sponsored by ARCUS. Specifically, Kaden is part of a program called TREC (Teachers and Researchers Exploring and Collaborating), which seeks to have teachers work actively with researchers and bring these experiences back to their classrooms.

The crew deploys the spider-like “multi-corer” from the rear deck of the USCGC Healy. The corer recovered eight undisturbed short cores of the top-most 40-50 cm of bottom sediment, sometimes capturing small creatures, and even small, formerly ice-rafted pebbles.

Berger says about Kaden, “She has volunteered to help various science groups in their tasks, including my own subgroup.”

Berger—with Kaden, other scientists and some members of the crew of the Healy—also participated in a live voice-web interview with students from Te Aroha College, New Zealand, where Berger was able to answer questions about why the scientists were collecting mud from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and what they expect to learn from the cores.

Crew members Dr. Don Perovich and Bruce Elder, both of the U.S. army cold regions research laboratory in new hampshire, photograph and record a core of sea ice, with shallow summer melt ponds behind.

On the TREC website, Kaden posted answers to the many questions that have been asked of her by students from around the world. Students from places such as Germany, New Zealand and the U.S. asked questions that included: “What do you see from the ship?” “How many people live on board?” And, “What do you eat on the ship?”

Postings on the Internet also told of the hard work involved with gathering data in the form of mud and clay from the sea floor. As the ship neared the North Pole, the air temperature often was below freezing, despite the continuous daylight and “Arctic summer” that the crew and scientists worked in. It even snowed—a surprise, considering the Arctic Ocean is a desert, getting less than five centimeters of water-equivalent precipitation per year. Coring shifts were long—often over a day—and, judging from the pictures and descriptions posted at the website, hauling muddy cores up from the bottom of the ocean in freezing weather is cold, hard work and hardly a carefree adventure.

Despite the difficult but routine work of collecting samples and data, some of the journal entries do read more like an adventure story. During Leg 1, the Healy became stuck, listing in the ice and drifted for several days. There were some worries on the part of the scientists about getting out of the ice, but apparently, the captain was unconcerned, sure they would be free of the ice soon.

Berger said, “For three to four days, it was a relief to be without the crunches and crashes that accompany ice breaking (which is done by riding onto the ice, not through it), but it was unusual to shower, eat, sleep, etc. at a four-degree list!”

Making a list and checking it twice: Dr. Dennis Darby, from Old Dominion University, Va., and Dr. Glenn Berger make a pit stop at the geographic north pole, with the USCGC Healy shown behind them.

While waiting for the ship to break free, some scientists got off the ship and collected samples from the surrounding ice, making the best of the situation. One day, everyone on the trapped ship watched as a mother polar bear and cub came within a few hundred meters of the Healy.

Berger said, “All of us were thrilled...to observe their periodic swimming, wrestling and mutual nudging as they wandered past.”

The Healy finally was able to break free of the ice, and the journey—and data collection—continued after this detour.

The outreach component of the HOTRAX science missions helped put the public in the scientists’ shoes on board the Healy and gave a better appreciation of the hard work that goes into collecting scientific data. By reading the journals, looking at the pictures and following the HOTRAX expedition on the Internet, the public caught some of the scientists’ excitement on the ship as they gathered data about Earth’s past in an unknown region. Their everyday work on the Healy getting data from the frozen Arctic Ocean could be seen by the public as a large part of an adventure into the unknown and as an urgent mission to find causes and traces of accelerating global climate changes.