Part I: Seals teeth and whales ears - Scott Polar Research Institute ...

plankton hauling on the first two stations, NX and N. At each station the ship
was stopped and the depth measured. If it was deep enough we sent down two
series of Nansen water bottles to 1200 m - off Greenland we hoped to get down to
3000 m. These bottles have thermometers affixed to them and by an ingenious
mechanism, first developed by the Norwegian explorer Nansen, samples of water
are taken at depth intervals. We analyzed the samples for saltiness and recorded
the water temperatures. Then we sent down an instrument called a bathythermograph
that drew a graph of the temperatures, down to a depth of l40 m, on
a smoked glass slide. While this was going on two others were making a
plankton haul, sending a special kind of net down to as deep as 600 m and
hauling it up slowly. This caught plankton (the floating life of the sea - small
shrimps and worms, jellyfish, snails and minute plant life) and the samples were
bottled and stored for future examination under a microscope.
Then I helped Arthur until 10.30 pm, when I turned in. The weather had
worsened during the day and there were snow squalls, but it cleared in the
evening. It was still light and remained so for most of the night.
Next day I was up at 5 am to help Arthur. The ship was heading for station W,
a lowering comprising water bottles, salinity and oxygen samples, temperature
and bathy-thermograph. We finished in time for breakfast - delicious fried cod.
Then Arthur went to bed and I filled in some data, did a little work and spent
some time on the bridge with "the skipper". (In addition to the Captain, there
were several trawler skippers aboard, who supervise the trawling operations, not
the running of the ship). He told me that seals, from his description harp seals,
were often caught in the trawls. The weather improved and we found ourselves
sailing into the sun. The sea was becoming calmer all the time and there were
interesting cloud shapes on the horizon, to relieve the seascapes. We saw a
number of fin whales in the mirror-calm sea, blowing and splashing; who would
think we were in the Arctic? We worked another station at 9 pm – bathythermograph
and plankton hauls. Then the weather deteriorated again.
Next morning it was rougher again and I took the bathy-thermograph traces
at stations P and L, experiencing trouble with the net acting as a sea anchor for
the whole ship. Glaucous gulls, little gulls, terns and fulmars appeared. At about
9.45 pm the island of Jan Mayen appeared on the radar screen, 19 miles off on
bearing 280°. It was very rough during the night and next morning, with an
overcast sky and low visibility. We "dodged" about during the night and then
sighted the island at 10 am, first a low cape and then higher land, cloud-capped,
but with snow patches visible. Blue sky appeared and the clouds cleared
progressively throughout the day, so that we had a very fine view of Beerenberg,
named after a Dutch admiral and nearly 8,000 feet high. It had a truncated
volcanic cone covered in snow and ice, with glaciers flowing down the sides like
streams of molten white lava. The position and size of the moraines now
indicated a great regression of the former icecap. It was an interesting-looking
island, with strange cliff rock formations, reminiscent of Deception Island in the
Antarctic. There was a Norwegian weather station on the island but we saw no
one.
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