First few days on the CCGS Amundsen

Sorry there hasn’t been a post in a while… hard to get internet time when you have to share 2 computers with 50 other people. Today is my third full day onboard the ship. To bring you up to speed:

Friday afternoon we took the helicopter from Iqaluit to the ship, which was pretty much the best ride of my entire life! We flew over the ice-bound Frobisher Bay, then landed on the deck of the ship, which looked quite frighteningly postage stamp-sized from the air. The ship is pretty huge, bigger than I thought it would be. There are 6 different levels, and a gajillion (yes, this is a number) different decks; I can’t remember half of them. Mostly I just wander about like a lost sheep until I end up where I need to be (pure luck, mostly). The first day we just had a medical exam, then we got settled into our rooms, which consist of 2 bunkbeads, a sink, a desk, and closet. We did some orientation stuff, which clearly didn’t help me any, and met the captain and most of the scientists.

Day 2 can be summarized in one word; seasick. The water was really choppy (at least to a landlubber such as myself), and by midmorning we were all sprawled about the ship, wishing a polar bear would just eat us and end our misery (or at least, that’s how I felt). I slept for most of the day, and when I wasn’t sleeping, I was eating ginger and soda crackers and trying not to throw up (with limited success). Happily, by midafternoon things had calmed down, both in the ocean and in my stomach, and I was so happy I daringly ate a celebratory chocolate bar! At 3:15 (which I must remind you is sunset here), we had our first fire drill. It lasted an hour and a half! Longest fire drill of my life… it was actually really fun; we spent most of it sumo-wrestling in our lifejackets and playing stupid games on the flight deck. In the evening, we had a lecture about “Nunatsiavut Nuluak” fiord ecosystem study (nunatsiavut means “beautiful land” and nuluak means “net”, as in a network of information). Basically, we’re taking samples from four different fiords and gathering info about the critters that live in the mud in order to assess the impacts of climate change and human activities on the fiord ecosystems. Very cool stuff for an environerd such as myself!

Yesterday was the best day of my life onboard the ship. First thing in the morning, I was put to work de-icing the front of the ship, which got soaked during crazy winds the night before. By “de-icing” I mean whacking the ice off with giant wooden mallets, cartoon-style (so satisfying!). After that, I got to work in the benthos lab, which is affectionately named “Florida” because there is a warm air vent right in that spot which keeps the lab toasty warm (“toasty” being a relative term meaning warmer than freezing). “Benthos” are all the creatures that live on the ocean floor. We collected them using an “agassiz net”, then poured the resulting bucket of mud and organisms through a sieve, which we then rinsed until nothing but critters remained on the sieve. Next, we roughly sorted them by putting similar looking creatures together on trays, and threw back any extras (for example, if we had a gazillion shrimp, we would just keep half a gazillion). We then sorted them into containers according to species, then labelled them and covered them with 95% ethanol to preserve them. Then, we sent them off to different scientists for testing. I have to go now and learn about the geology of the fiords (woohoo! and I’m not kidding!), so I will hopefully do another post later today…