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August 4th, 2009 -At Sea 70 16N 126 02W
by Herb McCormick
(August 4): The title of today’s log is brought to you by the Caucasian rapper Vanilla Ice. (Now there’s a sentence we feel quite certain that you weren’t expecting to read today.) The highlight of Mr. Ice’s thankfully brief career was indeed a “song” entitled “Ice, Ice Baby,” and while we acknowledge that it’s a reach, it also sums up quite succinctly the overriding thoughts and concerns currently shared by the entire crew of Ocean Watch.
Ice. Baby. Ice.
At mid-afternoon today, Ocean Watch had passed Cape Bathurst on the Canadian Arctic mainland and officially entered the western flank of the Amundsen Gulf, a significant waypoint on our attempted eastbound transit of the Northwest Passage. For the first time in many weeks, we were “off soundings,” with hundreds of feet of water under our steel cutter’s keel. This happy circumstance won’t last long. By this evening, we’ll be anchored somewhere in the shallow vicinity of the Booth Islands off the long finger of the Parry Peninsula.
Furthermore, not far past the peninsula, the gulf’s depths recede to less than zero, choked from its northern coastline to its southern extremities with an almost solid plug of ice. The onboard game, for the next several days, will be called “waiting.”
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| Today’s Canadian Ice Service Chart of Amundsen’s Bay. |
We have a very good idea of what the route ahead looks like via the excellent color-coded ice charts downloaded from the Canadian Ice Service (http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca). Each chart is festooned with a series of graphs called “Ice Eggs” that depict the various percentages of ice thicknesses, as well as the composition of the ice fields with regard to old ice, new ice or fast ice (ice that’s attached to shore).
Frankly, I’ve found the eggs harder to grasp than Chinese arithmetic. Besides, the maps themselves tell the story pretty well. Red is bad: 9/10ths of impassable ice. Green and yellow are good: 1-3/10ths and 4-6/10ths, respectively (not passable yet, but getting there). As we’ve discovered thus far, the green and yellow fields are the first to thaw, and turn to blue, which speaks for itself. Blue is open water, the road to the Promised Land.
To recap: Blue is clear water, and the approach to Cambridge Bay, and the port itself, are now navigable waters. It’s the big chunk of red between Ocean Watch and the bay, about 150 nautical miles, which is our immediate, pressing concern.
Ocean Watch can, and has, successfully negotiated up to 2/10ths ice on our approach to Barrow, Alaska, last
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| An example of 2/10ths pack ice. |
month. That’s our limit. In those conditions, there are goodly stretches of broken ice, some of which are impassable, but there are also open leads that can be transited slowly and with great care. Given the current state of the ice, we’ll likely be exploring the Parry Peninsula for the next few days.
There are a couple of things happening here. In an August 1st article from the Canwest News Service entitled “Ice pockets choking Northern Passage,” reporter Randy Boswell summarizes the situation thusly:
“Despite predictions from a top U.S. polar institute that the Arctic Ocean’s overall ice cover is headed for another ‘extreme’ meltdown by mid-September, the Environment Canada agency monitoring our northern waters says an unusual combination of factors is making navigation more difficult in the Northwest Passage this year after two straight summers of virtually clear sailing.
“In both the wider, deep-water northern corridor and the narrower, shallower southern branches of the passage (the projected and current route of Ocean Watch), the Canadian Ice Service says pockets of more extensive winter freezing and concentrations of thicker, older ice at several key ‘choke points’ (like the one just ahead of Ocean Watch) are complicating ship travel. ‘In the southern route,’ Canadian Ice Service officials told Canwest News Service, the agency has ‘observed more ice coverage than normal. This is partly due to the fact that the ice in the Amundsen Gulf consolidated this past winter, which is something it didn’t do in 2007 and 2008.’”
We’ll take a deep breath here and try to summarize the above. The record thawing in 2007 and 2008 loosened great concentrations of “old ice” in the Beaufort Sea, which has moved into the Canadian archipelago in the central part of the Northwest Passage – Ocean Watch’s current position – and rendezvoused with younger, first-year ice to produce several roadblocks on our path.
Though this is proving to be an inconvenience for Ocean Watch, the story goes to great lengths to address the grander, more important point: The Arctic ice cap is continuing to recede at a record pace, and remains seriously at risk due to climate change and other factors.
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| David Thoreson on Cloud Nine in 9/10ths ice. |
“While Canada’s trans-Arctic sea route remains clogged with ice, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSDIC) is predicting another near-record meltdown by the end of this summer’s thaw,” writes Boswell. “The unprecedented 2007 shrinkage of polar ice cover to just 4.13 million square kilometers – nearly matched last year when only a 4.52 million sq. km. expanse of ice was left by mid-September – has led many forecasters to envision a virtually ice-free Arctic.
“Scientists believe the ongoing retreat is being driven by several factors, including rising global temperatures associated with human-induced climate change, and the associated break-up and loss of thicker, multi-year ice that is being replaced only seasonally by a thin layer of winter ice that disappears quickly each summer.”
Harry Stern, a polar ice scientist from the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab, will be joining the crew of Ocean Watch in Cambridge Bay. In an email message yesterday, Harry looked at the big picture and has identified three more “problem areas” along our track north of the bay: “Crossing Queen Maud Gulf from 103W to King William I.; Larsen Sound; and Prince Regent Inlet (east of Bellot Strait). There are pockets of open water, though, and (based on previous years) I think it will open up enough for boats to get through, but maybe not until late August/early September.”
So, yes: In the words of The Vanilla One, “Ice, Ice Baby.” It’s about to rule our world.
- Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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