No time for writing the last three days, time seems just flying and the last days were pretty intense! Even if we haven’t reached our first station yet. There still are many things to organize, starting from fine tuning the cruise plan and sampling organization.

Before we went onboard, we have of course made a cruise plan. This was already quite a challenge: 45 days for each leg seems like a long time, but it’s way too short for covering everything in such a huge area with so many interesting features to explore, especially since each workgroup has a bit of a different focus. Decisions had to be made about what to prioritize, while still making sure that everyone gets their piece of the scientific cake. After several iterations, we had a draft ready. This plan was  polished by the contributions of the Oden’s crew, e.g. how shallow are the waters we allowed to go or how fast we can actually go at what ice conditions. The ice and weather conditions is the biggest uncertainty in our planning. Sure, the Oden can break through ice, but the speed its moving at differs a lot (12 knots in open water to 6–8 knots through thin ice to only 2knots in thick ice!).

Most of our work – the water and sediment sampling – takes place at stations, meaning that the ship has to stop. Now there are different ways of “stopping”: The ship can anchor with the engines switched off, or the ship could be just drifting and reposition when necessary. That maybe sounds like a trivial problem, but it is actually a bit tricky. The problem with drifting is that ideally we want to have a set of measurements using different sampling devices at the same spot. So the ship shouldn’t drift too far away from the desired location. Also, one has to make sure that the drift doesn’t get too strong so that the sampling devices hanging from the ship don’t bump onto the reeling.

Another big issue is sampling using the so-called Niskin bottles, our main water sampling device. These are 7l bottles, 24 of them placed on a rosette that will be put down into the water. The bottles are open when going down and can programmed to be closed at different depths, thus getting samples from the different layers of the water column. Sensors placed on the rosette measure online water parameters like temperature, pressure, salinity and oxygen concentration. As soon as the rosette is up, everybody begins to subsample from it – and that has to be organized as well! Once the bottles are open, the sampling has to happen quickly: The water gets in contact with the surrounding air, and gases that are dissolved in the water will start to equilibrate with the air. For example methane: Most of the time, we have higher methane levels in the water than in the atmosphere (at least in the areas that are interesting for us), so the methane will tend to leave the water to get into the air. This means we have to sample quickly . I am very happy about how my 3-person team works! One of my team members is already very experienced in this task, but the other one has never been on an expedition before but she is learning very quickly and already got well into the routine!


Apart from the work, also the landscape is quite amazing. Two days ago, we reached the ice, and I could just spend hours watching it... especially on a sunny day as today, it is just beautiful. There are all kinds of beautiful features – icebergs, large pieces of really thick, old ice, fresh thin ice and seeing the Oden crushing through it is quite impressive. The last days the ice didn’t seem to slow us down at all, but today we came into really thick ice (about 2–3m), so a few times we actually had to reverse and start a second attempt to break the ice.
Our “wildlife observations” haven’t come too bad as well: We all have been speculating whether we will see polar bears, and already on the first day in the ice we have seen two of them, one of them really close! This morning I also spotted a really fat seal, also whales have been seen already (I missed that), and then there are lots of birds flying around the ship... so, whenever we find a free moment, we spent some time outside, watching or taking pictures.

The 24-hour day is also still having an effect on me, I have difficulty getting to sleep in the evening. Once I am in bed it is fine, but I simply don’t feel tired until late, because it doesn’t feel late. Besides, there is so much going on that most of the time we go back to the lab after dinner, and again, it doesn’t feel like working late because it is so light outside. There are also some activities in the evening: Most days we have seminars, where different scientists presenting the science behind their planned cruise activities – in a way that is understandable to everyone. Members of the crew are also giving presentations, often combined with pictures from earlier expeditions. Other activities have been showing a movie in the small onboard cinema and an afrodance class in the gym, organized by Emma and me. And then you also spend time getting to know your new colleagues: For example, for me it has been very interesting to talk with the Russian colleagues and learning about their work and everyday life – some things are really different between our cultures. We also try to pick up a few words and sentences in each other’s language. In our cabin, we have four different native languages, so we started to put labels on everything with the name of this piece of furniture in English, Swedish, German, Russian and French.

 With all this excitement it is difficult to fall asleep. Two days ago I realized that I was exhausted and went to bed at 9pm (UTC). Today I am also turning in early, to really try and save my energy for the action to come – just 2 days left to the first station!