Introducing Mystery Class #8
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Hi Students! My name is Jamie Morison.
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Hi Students! My name is Jamie Morison and I am a physical oceanographer from the University of Washington in Seattle. At the time this Introduction was being written in late April 2010, however, I was not in Seattle. Did you figure out where I was? Any of you who discovered the North Pole as the location for Mystery Class #8 were close.
Are you familiar with the word "logistics"? Originally a military term, logistics is the function of providing all the physical support necessary for a particular mission, including things like water, food, fuel, transportation, electrical power, tents, stoves, communications. Since April 2002, we have used Ice Station Barneo as a logistics base for our polar scientific research. Barneo has actually been operating every year since 1994; however, it is not a permanent year-round facility. Instead, it only operates during the month of April (give or take a week or so).
And Barneo is not a permanent structure or building--instead, it's a group of tents which you can see in the aerial photo above. Up here, we're drifters
Green line: Barneo's movement March 15-April 1, 2008 If you and your tent at Barneo are right at the North Pole today, by the next day your latitude/longitude location may be 10 nautical miles away even if you have not actually moved your tent. All that being said, Barneo is still the closest thing to an occupied North Pole station that there is.
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What is Life Like at Barneo? |
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Life at Barneo is not long on creature-comforts. When it is -35°C (do you know what temp that is in °F?) outside with a wind, warm inside space is at a premium. So the emphasis is on going light, getting the projects done as quickly as possible, and getting out before the warming weather and approaching summer fog make the runway too hard to maintain. What do you I like and not like at Barneo? What do we eat at Barneo?
Food is a little different thing when I leave Barneo and go out into the Arctic on the ice to install, monitor and extract data from the remote scientific instruments we use. When we go out for this, we go to remote mooring and buoy "camps". Out there, we tend to have camping type food we bring ourselves. The same is true for food on flights we go on when we are there to conduct hydro surveys, but we also sometimes have bread and cold cuts provided as box lunches by Barneo. Occasionally get a chance to eat or relax with the Russian helicopter crew. Then the food is more memorable. A custom from their part of Siberia (Norilske on the Yenesey River) is a shot of vodka followed by a slice of frozen raw fish dipped in a sauce. It is very good. Our Russian friends are very good at making an impromptu party - picnic by slicing up cold meats and vegetables (pickled in this case), a little bread and vodka. Very conducive to toasts and story telling. What do people do for fun at Barneo? How do we stay in touch? Visit the North Pole?
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| Warm Weather Causes Big Problems at Barneo | ||||||
This year, warming weather made things quite challenging at Camp Barneo. During the evening of Apr 10/early morning of Apr 11 a large "lead" opened up across the ice runway and through the middle of camp. A "lead" is a crack in the ice that opens wide enough to cause trouble if you are out there on the sea ice, say anywhere wider than one can safely jump, conservatively. Leads render runways unusable and split camps into separate units, and that's what happened this year. The field staff at Barneo had to move most of the camp structures (tents) such as the galley and berthing tents across the lead, because the lead split the camp up into separate units, and they had to re- consolidate the camp in one place.
In a breakup, the runway is usually the first thing you lose because runways are typically built on thinner ice, 1 meter or even less (other ice nearby can be 3 meters thick). This year, the runway was 1.8 km in length but it became unusable when these leads appeared. The field staff at Barneo marked out a new runway and took several passes on it with a bulldozer to groom it.
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| Getting to Barneo and Getting Around the Arctic | ||||||
To get to Barneo, we have flown there from Resolute and Alert in northern Canada, and more recently we have flown there from Longyearbyen, a Norwegian community in Svalbard (Spitzbergen), the island group north of Norway. Other flights to Barneo fly from Russia, specifically from Khatanga. One of the planes that flys to Barneo is a Russian aircraft known as an Antonov An-74 STOL jet. The STOL stands for "Short-Take-Off-and-Landing". Once the planes reach Barneo, there is a smooth runway which the operators have cut on the ice.
To travel around the Arctic once we are at Barneo, we usually do it in a Russian Mi-8 helicopter. GPS allows the helicopter to deliver travelers right to the spot of the exact North Pole, or locations around the pole. Helicopters are used for this because planes need a smooth piece of ice long enough to serve as a runway. You can't count on finding one right at the Pole. But some skiplanes as large as a Twin Otter do land pretty close to the Pole. With Barneo in place for the month of April, increasingly exotic means of travel have been used to get the last degree to the Pole. Cross-country skiing is common, although not exactly routine. Dog teams, ultra-light and antique airplanes, and hot air balloons have been tried too.
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| Scientific Research at the North Pole | ||||||
I have traveled to the Arctic nearly every year since 1974 to conduct scientific research for a long series of exciting projects. I am a physical oceanographer at the University of Washington in Seattle. Since about 1990 in particular, the Arctic has been a focus of the world's concern about global climate change, and understanding that has been a principle goal of our research. Since spring 2000, I have been a principal investigator of the North Pole Environmental Observatory. This "Observatory" is not an actual building, instead it is an international research team supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants OPP–9910305, OPP–0352754, and ARC-0856330. Our group of scientists has been conducting expeditions each April to the North Pole to take the pulse of the Arctic Ocean and learn how the world's northernmost sea helps regulate global climate. The team establishes a group of unmanned scientific platforms to record data throughout the remainder of the year on everything from the salinity of the water to the thickness and temperature of the ice cover. For long-term observations, an automated station does the work of an occupied camp, but at far less cost.The area around the North Pole is far from any landmass or observing stations. Even with the use of submarines and icebreakers it is difficult to obtain long-term measurements at the Pole. The Observatory offers opportunities for three types of measurements:
One of kinds of drifting buoys are the NPEO WebCams, which take still color photographs of the ice, snow, and weather conditions about the buoy array and transmit them over the satellite. Visit the North Pole Without Getting Cold Watch this Web Cam video of what a week can look like here:
For the Russians who run the station, it is a money-making proposition. But the existence of Barneo's runway for that short month each year gives scientific projects like the North Pole Environmental Observatory a useful logistics advantage. And if you want to show up with a fat checkbook and a pair of skis, Barneo is at your service. I've enjoyed being a secret Mystery Class. I hope you had fun meeting me and learning about the Arctic. If you have any questions, you can write to me.
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