Written by: Larry Mayer
All my life I have enjoyed going to sea. It was what drew me into oceanography and what has sustained me though the sometimes bureaucratic and frustrating aspects of academia. I have been privileged over the years to have taken part in almost 100 research cruises, travelling to all parts of the world, addressing fundamental scientific questions and hopefully contributing to a better understanding of our planet. And while it has been the pursuit of answering important scientific questions that has driven me, I must admit that what also led me into sea-going ocean science was the recognition of how little is known about our oceans and that their study was also a very pure form of exploration.
Nowhere is the combination of science and exploration more evident than in our missions to the high Arctic, and particularly our current mission, where we are mapping and making measurements critical to our understanding of the melting of the Greenland Icecap and the rise in global sea level, in areas where no ship has ever gone before.
It is in the spirit of science and exploration that we were honored to learn that our GEOEO24 Expedition was selected as an Explorers Club Flag Expedition. The Explorers Club is a world-renowned professional organization with the goal of promoting scientific exploration and field study. The Club has endorsed flag expeditions since 1918 and the flags have been carried on every continent, to both poles, to outer space and to the depths of the oceans. There are currently 222 numbered flags, each with a unique history. We have been issued Flag Number 35 which interestingly first was issued in 1930 to a University of Michigan expedition to Greenland. Since that time, it has been to the highest mountains of Pakistan, to the jungles of Bolivia, the Okavango Desert in Botswana, the Maliau Basin in Malaysia, to the top of Mount Everest and Mt Mamasa in West Sulawesi and it was carried by Mensun Bound when he discovered the remarkably intact wreck of the Shackleton’s Endurance in the Weddell Sea.
There are four of us on board the ODEN who are members of the Explorers Club – Martin Jakobsson and Love Dalen from Stockholm University, Liz Weidner, our blog’s host, who recently got her PhD from University of New Hampshire and will soon be taking up a faculty position at University of Connecticut and me, Larry Mayer from University of New Hampshire.
Not long after we received the news of our selection as a Flag Expedition, we received more exciting news from the Explorers Club – we had also been selected as an Explorers Club Rolex Expedition, where the Club and Rolex provide a Rolex chronometer to worn during the expedition. For those like me who usually wear an inexpensive watch, it is both thrilling and a bit intimidating to wear a Rolex watch – but it is an opportunity and an honor hard to pass up.
We are now about a week into the cruise – we have been pushing north through Nares Strait – mapping the seafloor continuously and stopping to make measurements of the water temperature structure along the way and to take core samples from the seafloor. We have also been deploying land teams by helicopter who have been sampling ancient drift wood (to understand past circulation patterns), mapping and sampling the geology (to understand the tectonic history of the region) and collecting animal bone samples for DNA studies. All these studies will be combined to get a more complete picture of the history of climate in the region and to better understand the current rapid changes in melting of the icecap. Our ultimate goal is Victoria Fjord where, if the ice allows us, we will spend several weeks doing detailed studies of the melting processes of the icecap. We have run into very heavy ice today – and are already thinking about contingencies – but a lesson long-learned in the Arctic is that patience and flexibility are essential.
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