We are almost through our next subsection of the cruise, passing along the outer shelf of Laptev Sea crossing to the shelf break in the East Siberian Sea. There have been not so many studies of these waters, so we don’t have an idea what we will find. The focus of that part is more focus for the segment is to explore the fate of organic matter released from permafrost, so it’s more of an “hotspot” for Emma and Lisa than for me. On the methane side, we still take profiles at each station and keep our eyes open for interesting features, on thing being potential hydrate degassing on the slope. So far, we haven’t seen anything exciting, but on the other hand, we are just arriving today at the last two stations of that transsect, that have the potential of being interesting. And it also good to get a bit of a background data – to study the concentration profiles and isotope signatures on the way. We have more time between stations, 3–4 hours, even with steaming at 9knots. So, the methane team manages to work on a stable shift schedule, sampling at station and from the seawater intake between the stations, and we take care of analyzing the last data from the hotspot area (finished this morning!), sorting and plotting the large amount of data that we collected in the last days. And we try to help out Emma a bit – whose work is now getting intensive in that part of the cruise. So, the last days, I also caught up on sleep – during the days, as I am on the night shift. It is a nice to work night-time: there is now a bit of a daily cycle in the sun: still being light 24h, but the sun being higher up parts of the “night”, actually. The reason for this is that we are on UTC time on the ship, and thus not synchronous with the real timezone around us. So, it’s mainly sunny when I work, and the night time is also more relaxed – there is as many stations as during the day, but not so much structure – no fixed mealtimes, no meetings, not so many people around, and the washing machine is empty, so there is time to do some laundry in between stations (small things, but still just nice to have). Today at 5:30 pm, there is also a midcruise dinner – I am surprised when reading that on the screens, are we really already halfway through? We will try to celebrate a bit, and get off the workclothes and into something nice for a few hours…if there isn’t a station in the way! It is starting during my shift, so I will see how things go...
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