Halfway on the Fourth of July

The health and happiness of everyone onboard sits firmly in the hands of the kitchen staff. This is a responsibility that is taken seriously, and holidays offer a chance to extend that responsibility further and show off with some flare of culinary skill. This holiday was no different; only it also stood as the halfway point of the expedition so far. Fourth of July in the Arctic and cheeseburgers and apple pie were on the menu. The buns were baked fresh, and the patties were a mix of prime cut and spices, better than any barbecue I’ve attended back on land.

It may have been the surrounding Arctic Ocean, the thousands of miles between home and here, or Americans holding the minority on board, but the celebrations of fireworks and barbecues felt like an odd and distant idea. Even the thought of this being a halfway marker seemed at odds with experience. Warned before boarding, but still not fully believing it, time has a different form out here. You can never really get a grasp on it, and right when you do it has a habit of changing shape at the last moment. We remained at our first drilling site (VRE-03A) for eight days; in those days, it felt like a month had gone by. Somehow, despite being only a day longer than transit, it felt like twice the amount of time. From there, however, things sped up, two weeks zipped into one. This, of course, is aided by the eternal daylight that graces all of the shifts with its presence, add then the “Good mornings” said at the end of the day and the “Good nights” said at the start. I could have been born on this ship, and life back home only a distant dream, or I could have arrived yesterday, all of the experiences unfolding in a 24-hour period; both seem equally possible.

Being “lost in time” is exactly the problem the coordinated effort of all the working groups onboard is aimed at, so feeling lost in time is oddly appropriate while being onboard. Unfortunately for me, however, there is no Paleomagnetic team to identify reversals in my magnetic field that could tell me what week I am in or an army of micropaleontologists that can identify small microfossils that fall off me and identify what time of day it is by how hot or cold my body temperature is. No, sadly, these talented teams have their focus on the core samples as they come up, and my best time-keeping tool has been the arrival of Lava Cakes every Saturday (It has been four lava cakes upon writing this blog post).

In spite of the feeling of being lost in the present, the picture of the past is coming further into focus everyday. With nearly 3,000 meters of core recovered (2858.38m to be exact), and teams working around the clock, the personality of the Fram Strait becomes a little clearer with each core arriving in the lab. Unfortunately working in the region still comes with challenges. The possibility of gas hydrates has slowed down drilling operations at times, as an expected measure of precaution. As well as the presence of greigite, which has proven to be a challenge for the magnetostratigraphy of the expedition. The rare forming mineral has a magnetic field that dilutes the signal of the data from the past. Both of these problems can be overcome with interdisciplinary team work and time. Sea ice on the other hand can’t be overcome with this strategy, and after six successful days of drilling along the western slope of the Vestnesa Ridge the threat of large floating ice chunks moving in from the north would push us off site. As for now we head southward to keep clear of sea ice to start drilling at BED-01A. 

Working in the conference room I notice people making their way downstairs. The night shift is playing a round of ping pong on makeshift tables in the center of the room, and a “cookie break” brings some members of the opposite shift to join in for a moment before returning to work. A giant “round-the-world” game is starting up. Rather than compete, the emerging rule seems to be to prioritize the rally or just keep the game going. As more and more people gather, Co-Chiefs Kristen St. John and Renata Guilla Luchi join in. The scene is awesome, and just as it gets going faster the familiar “Core on deck” is heard over the comms. A faint reminder of the work sitting on the other side of the break brings the ping-pong rally to an end. Still not sure when I am, but not sure if I mind. Maybe that is what halfway feels like for everyone: good food, good people, and the slight hope that time doesn’t show up anytime soon.