May 15, 2000

Weddell Sea

The photograph shows the bow of the Nathaniel B. Palmer up against the pack ice of the Weddell Sea. There is a person in a red parka standing at the bow to give you a sense of scale. Photo is taken from the bridge deck 60 feet above the water line. At this height the horizon is approximately 10 miles away. What you see ahead of the ship is not land but the Weddell Sea choked with ice.

2:30 Monday afternoon, current position 64 38 south, 58 47 west

We are currently in the northwestern Weddell Sea off Cape Longing and the Larsen Inlet. We have had a wild night and day working through thick multi year ice that has blown out of the main portion of the Weddell Sea. This ice, some up to 3 meters thick, brought the ship to a halt around 4 this morning. This is with all 4 engines turning out 13,000 horsepower. With open water behind us we took the opportunity to do some coring, biological sampling and water sampling. It took most of the early morning and day to accomplish the sample collections. With all the samples on board and the processing under way we have started to work our way back along the channel we broke last night and see if leads exist that might allow us to proceed farther south. Some open water is visible that we could not see last night. Currently the plan is to establish a couple of coring lines from offshore to near shore in some of the more ice- free or at least thin ice areas.

The ship can break ice by either cutting or ramming its way through the ice, or if the ice is really thick it uses the power of its engines to force the hull up onto the ice. The weight of the ship then causes the ice to fracture. Last night the captain and ice pilot were running the ship up on the ice but the ice would not break. This is an approximately 308 foot long 50 foot wide steel ship, yet when it was driven up onto the ice and then backed off, the only mark left was a line in the snow from the ship's keel.

Dr. Eugene Domack's plan of operations for today, which is posted to the ship's internal e-mail system, summed it up nicely with the subject line reading " I like ice but...".

The Weddell Sea's most famous visitor was Ernest Shackelton who spent far more time than he had intended in the Weddell Sea. His ship, the Endurance, was crushed by this same multi year ice pack forcing one of the most heroic journeys ever undertaken. We have no intention of following in Ernest Shackelton's shoes, but now I can really appreciate the hardship they faced crossing the ice-filled Weddell Sea.

It took a few hours to back out of the area we reached in the early hours of the morning and are now breaking our way to an area we hope will allow us to run a line of cores, rather than just one. The local penguins and seals are very happy with our passage as now there is an open channel they can use instead of the widely scattered cracks they had been using to access the sea.

Dave Tewksbury
tewksbda@nbp.polar.org

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