Yesterday saw another successful deployment of DAB, the Directional Acoustic Buoy to track where underwater noise comes from exactly. Each survey starts in the same way: zooming in the boat to the fjord with the glacier, jumping on the beach to set up the cameras on the hills, and jumping back in the boat to deploy the DAB and get measurements. Zooming is of course an exaggeration: getting away from the base is a cautious start, as the skipper needs to negotiate between rocky outcrops (not visible at high tides, but still there and dangerous) and sometimes icebergs, Crossing the open sea to the fjord cannot be done too fast if the waves are too high, or the wind in the wrong direction. And once into the fjord, we have to zigzag between icebergs of different sizes. Jumping out of the boat is also an exaggeration: the seabed is very steep, and we have to wait until the very last seconds for the water to be shallow enough, getting into the water and holding on to the boat before painstakingly pushing it on shore away from the waves and the tide. Then, we lumber up the hill in our immersion suits. But the view from the top is worth it …
Today, we successfully deployed the long-term buoy which will measure ambient noise as winter sets in. We programmed it to start taking measurements from 15 November until the batteries run out (which should be in March 2015). This way, the buoy will record the onset of the ice cover in the fjord, and hopefully when it starts to break up in spring. To celebrate these different achievements, Jarek breaks out the whisky he had brought with him from Longyearbyen. And I carve some ice cubes out from one of the iceberg samples we brought back to the base for our experiments …
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