Our last full day on SWERUS, the Oden is now lying outside Barrow, customs issues are fixed, fuel and new food supplies brought onboard, and the handover to leg 2 has started. Suddenly there are new faces onboard, leg 2 crew and scientists, tanned from the Swedish summer and full of energy to start their part of the adventure.

While the knowledge transfer between leg 1 and leg 2 is ongoing between selected groups, the rest of us is packing, cabin cleaning and slowly getting back in civilization mode...

A few people were still taking the samples as late as yesterday. On the picture you see Célia sampling air from the ship’s chimneys – these samples are important to correct her air samples for potential influence of ship’s emissions. I wrote earlier in that blog about her challenge of taking samples when the wind comes from the right direction, and she is spent many hours during this cruise waiting for the right moments to sample, and has as much as possible avoided getting any effect from the ship exhaust into her samples. However, to exclude any doubts, she wants to characterize the source signature of the exhaust – how the concentrations of the different gases (methane, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide...) and their isotopic signatures look. These are likely to be different at different ship velocities, because the efficiency of the combustion process varies, so she has been taken several of these samples throughout the cruise.