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September 1st, 2009 – At Sea, Baffin Bay, 71 43N, 71 43W
by Harry Stern, Mark Schrader and Herb McCormick
(Sept. 1): On the long list of the items that can mess with a sailor’s mind, near or at the very top of the ledger is the ethereal, vaporous, maddening mist called fog. Make no mistake: In the entire atmosphere, fog is perhaps the most insidious, dangerous and elusive substance of all. The problem with fog is that it can play tricks with the mind’s eye, make you see things that aren’t really there. Throw in night and you have a larger problem. Toss in icebergs and you have a dilemma wrapped in a predicament.
Mix them all together and here’s what you have: Last night’s opening scene on the ongoing voyage of Ocean Watch as the crew made their way into Baffin Bay.
Mirages, visions and hallucinations will all play their role in today’s crew log, a collaborative effort between scientist
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| Mirages, visions and hallucinations all play a role in today’s crew log from Baffin Bay. |
Harry Stern, skipper Mark Schrader and me. We’ll begin with the captain, with an excerpt from his personal log:
“After a Monday morning and afternoon of ferrying fuel from the beach to the boat via our dinghy we weighed anchor at 1700, waved goodbye to Pond Inlet and motored east into Baffin Bay. It all sounds so easy when it’s reduced to one sentence. It wasn’t.
“Moving 350 gallons of fuel by dinghy loads of 5-gallon jugs and pouring it into the tanks – very carefully – is a pretty physical and patience-trying operation. We’ve done it a few times now so the drill is set, everyone has his job and it actually works well. That was the easy part. Motoring out into Baffin Bay was the hard part.
“As we finished fueling the weather changed from a nice, sunny and calm day to an overcast and windy one. It’s worth mentioning here that while we were fueling the young man operating the fuel truck casually offered that today was the first day of their short fall season, winter and snow would be here within two weeks. When I expressed some surprise at this, he just shrugged and said it was so. It was time to go!
“Naturally, when we were ready to leave the wind started blowing from the direction we wanted to go, the seas very quickly went from nothing to a steep three to four foot chop and our speed and comfort suffered accordingly. Ocean Watch usually does pretty well motoring through conditions like this but our typically easy seven knots through the water was quickly reduced to just over two as we spent a fair bit of time bouncing up and down rather than going forward. It made for a long evening.
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| There were at least two dozen impressively large close to the path. |
“Sometime just before midnight everything changed. The wind died, the sea became flat and the fog rolled in to make a dark night even darker. I don’t think I’ve yet mentioned ice in this story. We have a great radar/chartplotter/depthsounder instrument – two of them in fact – on board Ocean Watch, compliments of Raymarine. Radar echoes (targets) started popping up all over our screen, big ones. Our assumption that icebergs would be encountered along our route was correct. By the end of our watch this morning we’d passed at least two dozen impressively large bergs close to our track. While they are certainly interesting to look at and David Thoreson seems never to tire of capturing the image – the captain would like them to go away. That isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
“In the morning light we’re now able to see the Baffin Island coastline. It is impressive. Dotted with hanging glaciers, high peaks and entrances to multiple 50-mile-long fjords means this would be a fantastic place to explore – but not now.
“With just under 1,700 nautical miles to go to St. John’s, Newfoundland, the Ocean Watch crew will now settle into a nice, long offshore routine. Our onboard educator, Zeta Strickland, has temporarily left us and is flying ahead to help set up onshore activities with teachers and schools in St. John’s and Halifax. ETA St. John’s: on or before September 11.”
As the skipper noted, the conditions last evening were at times menacing, though much less so due to our excellent radar, and the fact that the bergs quite reassuringly were very clear, solid targets. Still, with the fog at its thickest, and the interface between sea and sky impossible to gauge, I must admit there were times when I could almost “see” an impenetrable slab of ice emerging through the gauze.
It wasn’t the only time in the last few weeks that an image on the horizon left me on the verge of hallucination.
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| Fog and Ice in Baffin Bay. |
Yes, I came of age in the 1970s, but these “flashbacks” weren’t the result of attending one too many Grateful Dead concerts so many years ago. In the Arctic, vivid mirages – particularly of low, relatively innocuous ice floes that appear to be giant, terrible walls of ice – are a recurring, and startling, image. But they can be explained, and thankfully, the prolific scientist Harry Stern is now aboard Ocean Watch, and once again he’s able to clear the air on the issue of Arctic mirages. Here’s Harry’s latest essay:
There’s More to a Mirage than Meets the Eye
One of the attractions for me of making the Northwest Passage on Ocean Watch is the chance to see up close the stuff I’ve been studying for 20 years – sea ice. Much of my time in the office is spent looking at satellite images of sea ice, or reading about sea ice, or analyzing data on sea ice. On Ocean Watch, I’m seeing it with my own two eyes – and I’m learning that my eyes are not always to be trusted!
“A few days ago I was peering through binoculars at the horizon ahead of us when I spotted what was clearly a towering block of ice. Knowing that sea ice typically rises only a few feet above the water line, I thought it must be an iceberg. But icebergs come from glaciers, and I knew there were no glaciers feeding the waters ahead of us for hundreds of miles.
“Twenty minutes later as we approached the chunk of ice, it had shrunk to normal size, just a few feet high, and it was clearly sea ice.
“Later in the day, again looking through binoculars, I was stunned to see huge vertical columns of ice rising up from the sea surface, like frost crystals a thousand times larger than life. Scanning the horizon, I also saw tall cliffs where there should have been low-lying islands.
“I was beginning to understand how Arctic explorers had mistakenly “discovered” so many non-existent lands. They and I had both been fooled by mirages.
“Arctic mirages are well known phenomena, succinctly described in a fine book called A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic by E.C. Pielou (University of Chicago Press), from which I will paraphrase the explanation, along with a diagram from the book.
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| Arctic mirage: Because of the large cold-to-warm temperature change with height, light rays from the top of the object bend more and arrive at the eye of the observer at a steeper angle than light rays from the bottom of the object (left), causing the object to appear elongated (right).
The diagram is reprinted from A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic by E.C. Pielou (University of Chicago Press). |
“The necessary conditions for the mirages I saw are: cold air close to the surface, and progressively warmer layers of air just above it. This occurs on still, clear summer days in ice-covered waters, when the ice keeps the surface cold, but the air warms quickly with height. Light travels slightly faster through warmer (less dense) air than through cooler (denser) air, causing light rays passing from cooler air to warmer air to curve back toward the cooler air (see diagram, left panel). Therefore light rays from the top of the object reach the eye of the observer at a steeper angle than light rays from the bottom of the object, so the object appears elongated (see diagram, right panel).
“Other interesting optical effects such as arcs, halos, inverted images, and the Novaya Zemlya effect are described in A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic and in other books such as Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez.
“A few days after the mirage incident, as Ocean Watch headed east in Lancaster Sound, we spotted what appeared to be a gigantic tabular iceberg on the horizon ahead of us, a long flat-topped berg with vertical ice cliffs for sides. A mirage? The conditions weren’t right – we didn’t have a cold surface and still air. The iceberg turned out to be real (see the Crew Log of August 29). We estimated its size as 1 kilometer in diameter with ice cliffs 15 to 30 meters high – truly impressive.
“The lesson? Question reality, but understand nature.”
- Harry Stern, Mark Schrader and Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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