The small icebergs brought to the shore have fallen silent with the evening. The sun is currently hidden behind the 500-metre mountain just behind the base, and the beach is in shadows. What suddenly made these icebergs silent? Curious, of course, we came to investigate after some colleagues told us there was no noise ... (motivated by some aspects of our research, they had combed the beach looking for icebergs with the most bubbles to add to their end-of-work drinks ...) We take measurements in air and in water, and conclude it is a conjunction of the type of icebergs, the contrasts in temperature (or rather the absence: air and water are both close to 1 degree Celsius), and the very calm seas ... We also take some samples to measure in the laboratory ...
Traffic in the Bay of White Bears has increased tonight: there is a large cruise ship at anchor in the deepest part (around 200 m deep), and we can hear the noise of its engines over the several kilometres of water. Another ship (further left in the picture), much smaller, decided to moor very close to where we had deployed an acoustic-recording buoy ... What about the noise it will make, covering what we want to measure over the coming months?
They are Norwegian hydrographers, though, so we do not really begrudge them: they must be doing exciting work too. And we all "comrades-in-arms": we all want to understand more about the polar regions and their climate. Thinking a bit more about it, our first buoy has been there for several months already. The second buoy, 25 metres away, will not start recording until November. So a few hours of engine noise will not really affect our different measurements ...
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