Wind and weather, water and ice Aug 21 2024

This article is part of the series “2024-08: Fram Strait cruise KPH”.

Wednesday, 21 August 10:36. It’s Annika’s and my fourth wedding anniversary, but I’m far away from her. I’m on the icebreaker Kronprins Haakon in the Fram Strait at 78° 50′ N, 12° 16′ W, that’s between Greenland and Svalbard. Air temperature is +0.2 °C, water temperature -0.1 °C. It is day 9 of the scientific cruise FS2024 of the Norwegian Polar Institute. Today I have found some time to write a blog article and also to publish it thanks to the fast satellite internet on board.

This article is about the journey, about the elements, not about research. I’ll come to this later in other articles.

13 August

Today the 2024 expedition to the Fram Strait begins. Short name: FS2024. 19 participants and 20 crew members are on board. Round 18:00 we leave the port, sail along the Adventfjorden and turn into the 107 km long Isfjorden. When we reach the open sea the sea gets rough and our ship starts to pitch and roll in the waves and not all people feel well. I have a cabin in the bow of deck 3 and the larger waves splash sea water against the port hole.

14 August

In the night the wind has calmed down. We are heading west and it is quite foggy. This year there is much less sea ice in the Fram Strait then usual at this time. Less ice coverage means increased air humidity and that results in fog.

15 August

It continues to be foggy, no need to take any photos of the sea. But in the afternoon the sun manages to fight its way through the fog. This results in two hours with blue sky and also in a phenomenon I never experienced before. A fog bow. As with usual rainbows the sun is in the back so it is not a halo. The water droplets of the fog are so small, that the colours are very weak and so the fog bow looks almost white.

16 August

Research as usual: Two mooring recoveries and several CTD casts, MSS casts, optical casts. The weather: also as usual. It is foggy again and it will stay like this the whole day.

It is not clear whether we will have any ice station on this cruise. The ice stations planned for yesterday and today have already been canceled due to the lack of sea ice and tomorrow it doesn’t look better. At lunch time at least the first chunks of ice have appeared.  That’s a nice change in the uniformness of the foggy weather.

17 August

For days we have been checking the wind speed on windy that forecasted winds up to 40 knots for today. That’s 20 m/s. And the gale has already reached us. The waves have started to get larger with spray on the top. They splash against the few ice floes drifting around us.

In the afternoon all research has been cancelled because of the increasing wind and growing waves. After dinner I go down to deck 3 and into my room. We have average wind speeds of 22-23 m/s now. The ship pitches a lot and in combination with the high waves (I think, 3–4 metres) the port hole of my cabin is occasionally under water. These are some screenshots of a short movie I made with my mobile:

Now the ice floes are not gently drifting anymore but are at the mercy of the waves. Is the storm our friend and blows that one nice looking ice floe in the north towards us? Or will the swell break the ice into smithereens?

18 August

Half past seven – breakfast time. Wind has calmed down to 15 m/s. We are at 78°50′ N und 9°30′ W. I work a lot this day on my computer, hardly looking out of the window. We want to reach 14° W tonight. That’s not so so far away as it sounds, since one degree west means a distance of just 21.5 km at these latitudes.

At 18:30 all people involved in sea ice work meet up. That’s also the people doing “bridge watch” looking for polar bears from the bridge at deck 8. We get a safety briefing for being on the ice and then we see a presentation created by ice expert Henrik that shows the ice situation. There are two possibilities for an ice station for the next day.

It’s hardly believable – we are still in open water with less than 1% ice. But we have a fresh satellite image and people who know ice so I’m optimistic. If only the ice is stable enough.

At least there are some flat ice bergs around.

19 August

At 4 o’clock in the night I wake up. I know this noise, the vibrations, these movements. Kronprins Haakon breaks though the ice! I look through the porthole – we are in the ice! Despite the early hour I get up to take photos on the helicopter deck. It looks so different from the previous days.

Shortly after nine o’clock I take my mobile phone to make this photo:

And this means – after a year and two month I finally stand on the arctic sea ice again. I missed it, I just love this environment! Today’s mission: Flying a drone to produce images for a so-called orthophoto. But that is another story to be told a bit later.