Cruise day – bird watching Jun 8 2023

This article is part of the series “2023-06: Arctic Ocean cruise KPH”.

After we left yesterday’s ice station we have been cruising. When I woke up today morning I looked out of the window. Open sea, no ice in sight. Flocks of sea birds. And then a puffin flew past the porthole. Give me a moment – a puffin!? I must have been dreaming. Anyhow I got dressed and went to the helicopter deck to take bird photos.

Just a note: I do not know all these sea birds, but on a scientific cruise there are always people you can ask.

Large flocks of little black-white bird swooshed round the ship. They flew so fast, that the photos mostly only showed blurred shadows. It was flocks of …

Alle alle · Little auk · Alkekonge · Krabbentaucher

I moved to deck 3 to take pictures from a lower angle and played with the focus configuration of my Nikon. That helped a bit. I managed to take some photos from sea birds as …

Uria lomvia · Polarlomvi · Brünnich’s guillemot · Dickschnabellumme

… with the typical white strap behind the beak

Or the …

Fulmarus glacialis · Havhest · Northern fulmar · Eissturmvogel

… that loves to glide just above the sea surface.

Or the …

Cepphus grylle · Teist · Black guillemot · Gryllteiste

… with its red legs.

More or more ice floes covered the sea, we were heading to the ice edge to find a good place for a second ice station.

Still there were a lot of little auks around …

… but more and more the

Rissa tridactyla · Krykkje · Black-legged kittiwake · Dreizehenmöwe

… took over.

After some time at least a hundred circled the Kronprins Haakon hunting for small fish.

There is one photo however that makes me happy. The quality is bad, but I managed to take a photo of a …

Fratercula arctica · Lunde / Lundefugl · Atlantic puffin · Papageientaucher

So, I wasn’t dreaming this morning.

I always wanted to sea these birds, that I have loved since childhood. And today I saw two of them flying around.

AO2023 – the first ice station Jun 7 2023

This article is part of the series “2023-06: Arctic Ocean cruise KPH”.

You may have read the article “Breaking through thick ice” that I published three days ago. We were west from Svalbard halfway to Greenland with the plan to head northeast to the station 05 north from Svalbard. We tried to get north or northeast, but all efforts looking were in vain. This is the track of 4 June, the 4th cruise day:

You see, that we didn’t come long that day. There was hardly open water, the ice was unusually thick (more than 150 cm) while Kronprins Haakon is built for 100 cm). The ice floes were too big to be pushed aside and the thick layer of snow added additional friction between the ice and the ship. We weren’t stuck but couldn’t had further north.

In the evening meeting it became clear, that we need a plan B. We were still on the Greenlandic side of the Fram Straight but never applied for the mandatory permit to do research there. Next morning a decision was made: Head south and to the Norwegian side and do an ice station there.

5 June – travel day

We travel through the ice until the evening and I do not have much to do. Time to take some pictures.

In the evening the cruise leader and ice experts start looking for the ideal ice floe. When it is found in the night I’m already fast asleep.

6 June – preparations

The next morning the weather is just awesome. Blue sky, -2 °C and hardly any wind. I go to deck 3 in the aft. That means helmet and safety boots. There I can see clearly that an ice station has started being prepared. The two snowmobiles have been moved from the helicopter hangar to the deck, the ship has been anchored by the ice and the ice gangway is hovering above the ice.It must hover so that no polar bears can sneak on board.

After breakfast the teams go onto the ice while I held polar bear watch with two others on the bridge. The things to observe are: polar bears, walruses, cracks in the ice, whether changes. After ninety minutes of watching the ice with binoculars and naked eye I start planning my drone flight route. Now I know, where the stations on the ice are located.

Just before lunch I get the opportunity to get on the ice the first time. I just want to re-calibrate the compass (we are far away from Tromsø) and check that the drone is working. And – it does! I’m able to take three fast snapshots to check the camera. I try to be fast, because lunchtime has already started and when you are on the ice, four more people are needed: not only the three polar bear watches on the brigde but also a polar bear guard with a rifle near on the ice.

Anyhow, the drone works and later I’ll stitch together the three snapshot from pre-lunchtime. Here’s the photo:

6 June – drone flying

After lunch I take another polar bear watch and then it gets serious. Fifteen minutes to prepare, then I get onto the ice. Again with a polar bear guard for safety. We go the the main coring site which suits me best, because it’s quite in the center of everything, Kronprins Haakon included. When I arrive there I even have time to take some snapshots with my Nikon.

You see the red, cylindrical thing? That’s an ice corer to take ice cores. The ice core will either be cooled down or melted on board to do different studies and measurements. When I did ice cores last year it was easy, because the ice was less than one metre. Now extensions have to be used and the core will be taken in several steps. But back to drone flying …

The last weeks I made a long checklist that I now follow to get everything right. When I’m ready to fly I tell the polar bear guard that the bridge shall deactivate the radar. It may interfere with the drone. He informs the bridge using a VHF-radio and soon I can start. Whirrr …

The first photos are for checking the manual exposure:

But now it gets serious. I fly to the stern of the ship and then right. Move the camera straight down and take the first photo. Click! One. Move the drone to the left a ⅓ step. Click! Two. And the same again. Click! Three. Four. Five … Nine. Move the drone towards me a ⅓ step. Click! One. And to the right a ⅓ step. Click! Two … . You get the idea.

In the middle I have to land the drone to change the battery. I take 149 photos from 80 metres height looking like these:

It took round about 45 minutes to take these images. On the next ice station I may have to cover a larger area but I’m limited to three batteries. More than 60 minutes of flying is hardly practical. When I was ready the coring people were almost done as well and in groups we walked back to the ship, always accompanied by an ice bear guard with a shouldered half-loaded rifle.

Then my computer got work. Creating a so called GeoTIFF can take some hours. And that is a crop of the result:

I’m quite content with the result. It’s the second time ever I did this and the first time on the ice. The image however is not perfect. The ship is stitched together quite badly, there are a lot of artefacts as e.g. the interrupted yellow circle on the helicopter deck. Otherwise everything went pretty well. That I almost have lost the drone in the sea on the other side of the ship is a story that I may tell some other time …

7 June – leaving the ice station

Today there was still research on the ice. Two ice experts measuring ice and snow and three oceanographers taking MSS (MicroStructure Sensor), both with a bear guard. I however was not involved. Then everyone and everything went back on board including the snowmobile. Round 15:10 the ship has set in motion. Since then we are cruising to the next ice station.

Two more images and additional text about the drone flying you can read in the previous article Taking drone photos from the sea ice.

Taking drone photos from the sea ice Jun 6 2023

This article is part of the series “2023-06: Arctic Ocean cruise KPH”.

Yesterday night we started our first ice station on our research expedition. Today I was on the sea ice twice. Once just before lunch to calibrate the compass of the drone and then in the afternoon to really fly it.

After informing the bridge to deactivate the radar to avoid interferences I took 149 pictures in 80 metres height with the camera showing straight down. I had to switch batteries in the middle. The computer will need hours to stitch together the images. Only then I do know if I covered the whole ice station area or if there are “holes” – areas that I forgot. It’s not so easy when you fly a drone manually and do not have a lot of practise. In addition to that the ice is drifting and so the GPS positions constantly change.

I took some “normal” drone shots as well. The photo I just want to show here I took in the beginning to check if the manual exposure was correct. This photo is slightly edited but I hope that I do not have to edit all 149 photos for the stitched “orthophoto”. I’ll know later, either in the evening or tomorrow morning. Then I’ll write a bit more.

The next images show first some of the researchers and me – with the red helmet – in the foreground. The other image is a map that shows where we are right now.

Map with our current position (2023-06-06)

More about the ice station in general and the drone flying in special you can find in the next article “AO2023 – the first ice station”.

Breaking through thick ice Jun 4 2023

This article is part of the series “2023-06: Arctic Ocean cruise KPH”.

3. June

Yesterday 6:40. My alarm clock rings. In 20 minutes I will do ice observation together with a scientist. On the bridge on deck 8 there are windows in the floor, where you can measure the ice thickness, when broken ice floes are turned upright by the icebreaker Kronprins Haakon. I look several times, but yes, the ice is thick, approximately 120 cm. Kronprins Haakon is built for 100 cm of solid ice, but can ram though thicker ice on shorter distances.

Deck 3 is pretty low and you are quite near to the enormous ice floes that are aside the ship. Sometimes an ice floe is pushed beneath another one looking even more turquoise than over water.

Dima, the ice expert is here, too. He checks the ice thickness with a folding rule. He also comes to the conclusion: 120 cm.

We already had moved west the day before in the hope of better ice conditions. That brought us to halfway between Svalbard and Greenland. Now Kronprins Haakon slowly moves north cruising zigzag in the search for breaks with open water. But the farther north we come, the harder it gets. 80° N seems to be an invisible barrier. The captain of the ship heads west in the hope for better conditions. The tools: a slightly outdated SAR satellite map showing a radar image and the ship’s ice radar. It’s hard to navigate like this and we fantasise about drones that we can send ahead to check the ice conditions. I stay at the bridge quite long and so I am one of the lucky ones who see the hooded seal, that stays on the ice until we almost have passed. Just then it glides into the water.

4. June

6:40 – the same time. The info channel on the TV clearly shows that we have hardly moved the last hours. Again I look at the ice thickness on the bridge. Now it is more like 150 cm thick. Today we hardly make process and start talking about changing plans. At 14:30 the captain talks to the cruise leader that they will take a break. The last 24 hours we haven’t come north at all.

While the broken ice aside the ship’s port and starboard looks more and more impressive …

Breaking through the ice V: looking ahead

Breaking through the ice VI: looking back

… the solid ice layer looks bleak and dull. It has been cloudy like this since we left Svalbard behind.

We want to go north much further, but we have several issues.

the ice is unusually thick for the region and the season.
the ice floes are too big for being pushed aside by the ship.
the snow layer, varying but quite thick, adds friction between the ice and the bow

All of this makes it hard for Kronprins Haakon to move forward and more and more the vessel backs or pauses.

Wind could help changing the situation but we had calm weather since departure and according to the forecast this might continue for days. So, no help from the atmosphere neither.

So it can be when travelling in the High Arctic.

Where are we now? Right here:

Green shows the first day (started in the afternoon), purple the second day. Blue shows the third day and the black arrow is our current position. I do not have the track of today yet but you can clearly see, that we hardly have moved today.

It’s next to sure that we will not reach any of the stations on the plan, at least not on this way. Tomorrow after breakfast we will meet, discuss about our options and then the cruise leader and the scientists have to make a decision. I don’t have any function is this question.

Stay tuned …

Arctic Ocean 2023 – prelude May 31 2023

This article is part of the series “2023-06: Arctic Ocean cruise KPH”.

When it looks like this on my table …

… then I’m going to travel. I love packing lists and I need them so that I do not forget too much.

At 9 o’clock everything is packed (ca. 50 kilos!). At 10 o’clock the taxi fetches me and takes me to the airport in Tromsø. Two and a half hours we are in the air heading north.

It’s very cloudy but shortly before landing I finally can see something different than sky and clouds: Svalbard’s main island Spitsbergen.

Soon we will land in Longyearbyen, where I landed three month before. But there are some differences.

Last time I travelled with Annika and we went on vacation before I worked in Longyearbyen for a week. Now I’m travelling with some colleagues from the Norwegian Polar Institute. Shortly before we land on the airport I take a snapshot:

Kronprins Haakon in Longyearbyen from above

There it is: the vessel Kronprins Haakon which is more or less the reason why some colleagues of mine and I travelled north: Tomorrow we will go on board on this ice breaker and start an expedition way up north into the sea ice. For three weeks we will live and work on Kronprins Haakon and I’m so excited that I may be part of this.

Today I had some hours in Longyearbyen. I was quite curious how it would look like in late spring. According to a researcher there is a lot of snow for the season this year. But on sea level the snow has melted away and everything looks soaking wet and muddy. While Svalbard reindeer are probably happy I definitely prefer winter.

If everything goes according plan we will leave Longyearbyen tomorrow at lunch time. I guess it won’t be long until we do not have any regular internet. So probably I will not blog anything about this scientific cruise before I’m back in civilisation.

Bye bye – ha det bra!

P.S.: On Facebook a friend wrote to me: “You must have the best job in the world!”. My answer – short but genuine: “Yes!”

Snowy intermezzo May 27 2023

Last week it felt like spring is finally coming. Flowers were blooming in the forest, the snow had melted away rapidly and even the birch trees finally had become green.

Wood anemones in a small forest on Tromsøya

Since then it had been raining a lot. Yesterday it got quite cold and the rain turned into wet snow.

There were snow showers the whole night and this morning, too with temperatures round 0–1 °C. Is this what spring looks like? And we’re talking about the end of May.

Alas it was only a short intermezzo and while the mountains still look whiter than before snow has melted away throughout the day.

Taking orthophotos on Kvaløya May 15 2023

That’s me, nine days ago, near a parking place by the lake Finnvikvatnet on the island Kvaløya.

I just got a drone from the Norwegian Polar Institute, a DJI Mavic Pro 2. Since it is forbidden to fly a drone in Tromsø (too near to the airport) I chose a place on Kvaløya to check out the drone and practise a bit.

What you may expect from drone flying is photos like this:

What I actually did that day was taking a bunch of photos like these:

Back at home let the computer do some heavy work. That’s the result:

What I wanted to achieve is creating a so-called orthophoto. That is a stitched image that also contains geographical information. You need quite a lot of photos to get good results. In the map above it is only 9 photos and 11 photos in two distinct groups.

I used two softwares: First OpenDroneMap to create the orthophoto and then QGIS, an open source Geographic Information System, to present the orthophoto in a geographical context.

This afternoon I took a trip to Kvaløya again, this time to the way to Sommarøya and stopped by the lake Kattfjordvatnet. Here I pulled up the drone to an altitude of 80 metres and tried to navigate a rectangular zig-zag pattern with a lot of overlapping between the images. Beside of the fact, that the images are underexposed (and I was too lazy to correct them) I’m quite content with the result. The first image is an oblique shot, the second image is an orthophoto calculated from about 80 images and then placed into QGIS.

Today’s orthophoto from the eastern part of Kattfjordvatnet

Plan for the next two weeks: getting more practise!

Kronprins Haakon in between May 11 2023

Yesterday

Yesterday I took the car to the northern tipp of Tromsøya to get my tyres changes. When I drove back I had my studded “Nokian Hakkapeliitta 9” tyres in the car’s back and brand new summer tyres on the rims. On my way back I passed the port and there lay the ice breaker Kronprins Haakon.

I continued to the shopping mall Jekta to fetch a photo collage printed on a hard foam board. The photo show scenes from the expedition I joined last year with the very same icebreaker Kronprins Haakon (KPH or even KH for the lazy ones). At time it stands on my dresser. With 75×50 cm it’s larger than expected.

Today

Today I took the car to the port, parked it outside, went to kai 25 and went on board of Kronprins Haakon. Not to join a cruise but to meet my colleague M. on the bridge. Nice to be there anyhow. M. already had installed some GIS software plugins on a computer there. I configured another plugin on my computers that can show the ship’s position in realtime together with other map layers.

In three weeks

The ship’s position in realtime however works only when my computer is connected to KPH’s network. No use to have it home. But in three weeks I’ll enter the vessel again, then in Longyearbyen. Then I’ll join my second arctic cruise with the Norwegian Polar Institute that will lead us to the Arctic Ocean north of Svalbard. There’s a lot to do and I’m nervous because I have some tasks there that I never did before but I’m looking forward to it very much.

My first Thursday paddling 2023 May 4 2023

Today I was joining the “Thursday paddling” of the Tromsø Sea Kayakers Club. They started the season two weeks ago, I joined today for the first time this year.

At 18:00 a group of 13 kayakers left the shore by the boat houses and headed to Telegrafbukta, the small bay near my apartment. In the dull weather the kayaks and the paddlers in their drysuits always look quite colourful.

Although I’ve already been paddling in Sweden several times this winter it took me some time to find a rhythm. When I’m alone, I use to paddle slower.

At Telegrafbukta we decided to continue to Sydspissen, the southern tip of the island Tromsøya. There we turned back, paddling through snow showers.

We already saw it on the way there – there was very low water at Telegrafbukta, or just “Bukta” as the locals say. We took a break there but only a short one. The weather was too chilly to be comfortable.

We talked about the weather and came to the conclusion, that summer probably already was on first of May and now summer season is over. I’m not completely sure, if this theory will prove true, but on the way back spring or summer seemed to be far away.

It reminded me at last years first Thursday paddling. It was on 28 April and the weather was as snowy as today. Let’s see how the weather is next week.

A sunny car trip to Jøvik May 3 2023

As in many other countries 1. May is a rød dag, a red day which is an official holiday. The weather is beautiful and I decide to do something I haven’t done for a long time: a car trip.

I take the car to Jøvik, a village in Tromsø municipality located on the peninsula Lyngenhalvøya, home of the impressive mountain range “Lyngen Alps”. As soon as I leave the E8 travelling is slow. On the one hand there’s a lot to see, on the other side the roads are in a pretty bad shape.

Just some photos I took on this wonderful day trip: