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I wrote this last night after seeing the first real pack ice of my trip:
I had gone to sleep in the afternoon to rest before working stations at two am and when I lay down...

Arctic 2002: aboard the laurier

Trish
2004-01-08 21:49:56

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I wrote this last night after seeing the first real pack ice of my trip:
I had gone to sleep in the afternoon to rest before working stations at two am and when I lay down, open waters surrounded the ship. A few hours later the ship's grinding halting progress woke me. Instead of lying flat as she steamed, she pitched up and then crashed downwards in almost slow motion, far slower than any ocean swell I'd experienced.

I rose and went to my porthole. Through the dim light of dusk and fog
(9:23pm) I could see vast chunks of ice over a meter thick moving past my vantage. The effect from this level was ephemeral, unreal. In the dense fog I could see no further than 20 meters ahead and that range was dominated completely by these huge thick floes of melting multiyear ice.
It becomes hard to explain the noise they made, their size, and their power. They were large enough to heave our ship around, thick and numerous enough to make me concerned about getting through unimpeded. They were the ghostly guardians of Canadian sovereignty in the north, far more imposing that any military presence.

Scientifically they were on average a 30 cm freeboard, over 1m in total
thickness. The size of the floes was just on the order of 10m in diameter such that the pieces could move against each other freely, the open water between floes a meter or more. The degradation of the ice through the summer had rendered them porous and perhaps more delicate. I suspect melt and drainage had occurred leaving a porous freeboard with height much greater than expected through mass balance.

Searching for a different perspective, I went up one flight of stairs to be a level above the deck and from the heated comfort and 180-degree view of the winch room, stared out at the ice we chomped through. The forward lights of the deck illuminated the nearby ice for about 20m on each side of the bow. From this perspective, ...