Ice station one and polar bears

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

For days we wondered, will we ever have an ice station on this Fram Strait cruise in open water? But then at 14° 21′ W, 79° 02′ N we found a large ice floe to work on. Shortly after nine o’clock I finally was on the ice again!

But I wasn’t here to take snapshots but to fly drone and to take a lot of photos from above.

I had issues with the drone from the Polar Institute, so I fetched my private one. First I had to calibrate some sensors, especially the compass and then I put the drone into the air and made some photos to check the image exposure. Ok, looks pretty good.

Now I flew the drone in a rectangular zig-zag pattern. That’s a bit tricky, because the drone is positioned by GPS while the ice flow is drifting. Since I wasn’t sure if I covered every part of the ice station I flew a second round. The single photos look like these:

Before going on board I took a couple of photos on the ice.

On board I uploaded the photos first into my laptop and then into the program OpenDroneMap that would stitch the photos together and add geographical information. And then it was 11:30, lunch time!

After lunch I went up on the bridge on deck 8. Together with two others I was observing my segment checking for polar bears, cracks in the ice and weather. There were several polar bears around but all were further away. I also had a VHF to keep track on the people on the ice. I had two shifts, 12:30–13:15 and 14:00–14:45.

After my second shift I got to know that we had a polar bear in front of the ship. So one of the bears that we had observed for hours had finally decided to pay us a visit. That meant of course that all people had to leave the ice.  On the helicopter deck many people were around to watch the bear.

And there it was – a surprisingly white curious fellow that examined our ship. Did it smell the cake?

In the meanwhile OpenDroneMap finally created a properly rendered orthophoto. I was relieved because I was not sure if my drone photos were sufficient. This is an excerpt:

In the afternoon I had fixed the issue with the other drone. At 19:00 I would have another opportunity to go onto the ice to re-calibrate and test it. Our ice visit was however postponed because another polar bear was paying a visit. It looked much thinner than the other one, but on the other side the fur was wet. So photo shooting again. It surrounded the ship and then stopped, laid down onto its stomach, pushed itself forward with its furry feet and  then rolled in the snow before it continued its walk.

We had to wait some time but then the ice was clear and I had time to test the drone on the ice. It worked. Hopefully I would be able to use it on the second ice station on the next day but the forecast does not look promising. Too much wind.

I shot a drone selfie and then I was ready to go on board. I just had to put my hand into one of the polar bear paw prints for size comparison.

The bear won!

4 comments to “Ice station one and polar bears”

  1. Annika Kramer 2024-08-25 21:10

    So schöne Eisbären! So ein guter Fotograf!

  2. way-up-north 2024-08-25 21:38

    Vor allem: so ein glücklicher Fotograf, der so tolle Modelle hat.

  3. Futzipelz 2024-09-02 20:22

    Seit Jahren verfolge ich deinen Blog und heute bequeme ich mich endlich dazu, dir einen Kommentar zu schreiben.
    Die Drohnenfotos und die Fotos vom Eisbären sind wunderschön. Wow. Ich fahre in einem Monat für ein paar Tage nach Grönland. Ich bin schon sehr gespannt, ob ich ebenso schöne Eisberge zu sehen bekommen und vielleicht einen Eisbären.

    Beste Grüße
    Futzipelz

  4. way-up-north 2024-09-02 21:29

    Hallo Futzipelz.

    Darf ich fragen, was Du in Grönland machst? Ich drücke auf jeden Fall Daumen für Eisberge und – von sicherem Platz aus – Eisbären.

    /Olaf

Write a comment: