I am traveling from Toronto to Ottawa and the train has just started moving. I'm passing a familiar skyline of the CN Tower, downtown, the Don Valley, and hopefully soon I'll see Lake Ontario on my right. I lived in Toronto for 5 years and though I haven't been back often, the scenery remains a home from home. Ottawa will be all new to me, and I'm glad to have grounded myself in the familiar for my first jet-lagged evening. I will be met by someone from Students On Ice at the train station, and presumably a handful of soon-to-be-friends also arriving on this route. (The heavens have opened, so much for my scenic train journey.) How do I feel? Excited, apprehensive, confident, intrigued, honoured, calm. I love th...

Hayley Hung writes: The work schedule came out around midnight last night but did not last very long. The wind changed direction and it became unsafe to deploy the rosette. The nutrient rosette originally scheduled for 6:15 was cancelled. This is frustrating as the nutrient data are essential in performing correlations with other scientific data collected at a specific location. Unfortunately, we had to leave the region of Tuktoyaktuk without this data. I had a very good night of sleep though. Tony and Patrick filmed me taking an air sample at the bow. Everyone has started planning packing up. As this is the last leg of CFL and the ship will be used by the Inuit Health Survey, most of the laboratories, fridges and freezers have to be cleared out. There was a party o...

A new issue of the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears magazine is ready to view! Issue Five, Water, Ice, and Snow, uses the polar regions to better understand the water cycle as well as states and changes of matter. As always, the issue includes: Science and Literacy content knowledge ...

Hayley Hung writes: We woke up to more “rock n’ rolling” this morning. I wonder why they use office chairs with wheels on the ship... I was literally sliding from one side of the room to the other while working on my computer. The wind finally subsided in the afternoon and the sun reappeared around dinner time (17:00)… the rapidly changing face of the Beaufort Sea! Now that the rosette is finally working, we are playing catch-up this evening. It is already 21:42 (Mountain time) and there is still no schedule as of what work is to be done tonight. I am waiting for the nutrient rosette to go down for Amanda’s water samples; hopefully, around midnight. If not, may be another night of endless waiting…At least, everyone is excited that finally some work can be d...

Hayley Hung writes: To everyone's surprise, it was and still is extremely stormy today. The weather forecast said 25 C and sunny!! It was in fact raining with ice pellets, cloudy and 30 knots of wind gusting to 40+ knots. The ship was rocking back and forth like a leaf! Many people felt dizzy. All the rosette work was cancelled. When lowering a mooring, one of the shackles broke, losing part of the mooring to the bottom of the ocean. Luckily, this part was replaceable. There is a strong low pressure over the Beaufort Sea area as INCATPA team member, meteorologist Jianmin Ma, indicated in his comments on the blog earlier. We may need to move further back into the gulf b...

Hayley Hung writes: The ship was close to Tuktoyaktuk today. Many scientists took the barge and helicopter to the river delta to collect samples. Very quiet day for me to concentrate on the Arctic air concentration data of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) that I did not manage to work on back in the office. Gary, the captain and Tony went to Inuvik to find Tony’s luggage which was lost on his way up to the Amundsen. Poor Tony has been borrowing clothes from people for the whole last week. Tony was so happy when he showed up at the bar tonight in his new found wardrobe! ...

Hayley Hung writes: Since the rosette has not been functioning properly for several days now, most people have been working in the laboratories on samples previously collected and preparing for upcoming sampling. During this time, several moorings were deployed and a few net tows were collected. My air sampling has been working very well though. I had an interview with Anthony (Tony) Christopher and Patrick Ellison (Anthony Christopher Productions) who are filmmakers producing a documentary on the Amundsen. Despite the lovely sun, it was extremely windy and cold on the front deck where we did the interview. We were literally yelling at each other. The topic was mainly on contaminants transport to the Arctic and how climate change may affect such movement. ...

Hayley Hung writes: A very quiet day, most people stayed up through the night. When we got up, the rosette was once again not working. The conductivity-depth-temperature (CTD) acquisition system and pH sensors were not functioning and the pump turned off after reaching a certain depth. Scientists relying on the water samples were very frustrated. The ship cannot move further west out of the gulf as planned since the forecast showed 25 knots of wind west of Banks Island. We continued to retrieve moorings deployed in the last 2 years. New moorings were deployed for continued measurements. We had a big party and the theme was Camper's Christmas. I did not know what this was all about until Veronique explained that it is a Quebec tradition for RV campers to have Christma...

Hayley Hung writes: I took an air sample today and started working on some calculations for an article and the Dioxin meeting in Birmingham one week after I disembark. The rosette has been broken for the last two days. Veronique Lago, my roommate, is the rosette operator. She has been very busy trying to get it restarted. In fact, she has not been sleeping for more than 2 hours at any one time for the last 24 hours!! Amanda’s water samples were supposed to be taken at 10 pm. Due to the delays in repairing the rosette, we stayed up till 4:30 am to finish the sampling. The sun was finally here in the evening!! After so many gloomy days! Backed by an amazing hue of pink and golden twilight, it moved halfway down towards the horizon and came back up at around 2:30 am -...

Session announcement and Call for Abstracts American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting 15-19 December 2008, San Francisco, California Papers are invited for Session A35: Cooperative Studies Incorporating Measurements from Land-Based Atmospheric Arctic Observatories The main mission of the International Arctic Systems for Observing the Atmosphere (IASOA) is coordination of atmospheric data collection and observatories. The effort supports the International Polar Year (IPY, www.ipy.org), but is intended to establish a continuing network consortium into the foreseeable future. Data of interest to the IASOA consortium include measurements of standard meteorology, greenhouse gases, atmospheric radiation, clouds, pollutants, chemistry, aeros...