End of the cruise

Now leaving Prince William Sound with only 2 days left in the cruise. We will be heading into port at Kodiak, Island and spending the next 24 hours in airports or in the air as we head back to Texas. The weather prior to this picture got nasty for about 4 days; thus we reversed the order of some sites and worked inside Prince William Sounds to avoid the 60 knot winds out in the Gulf. In the end we acquired 869 line km of seismic data, 150 million bathymetic soundings, 530 m of mud, and over 300 sets of water samples. Very successful cruise!.... -- Sean

Thursday, September 16

Sunset over Kayak Island (center), thought to be an extension of the Aleutian trench faulting continued onto the continental shelf and eventually under the Bering Glacier. Point Suckling is to the right in the picture and Prince William Sounds starts on the far side of Kayak Island. Only 7 days left.... -- Sean

Monday, September 13
We have spent the last two days in Disenchantment Bay, named by Cook when it proved to not be the northwest passage. The picture is about 2 miles from the Hubbard Glacier with the St. Elias Range in the background. The Glacier is tidewater and over 300 ft high. The sediment laden fresh water is coming from the left in this picture and you can see the boundary between this plume and the saltier bay waters as a clear line marked by small icebergs in the foreground. While we observed the glacier front doing bathymetric mapping, seismic surveying, and hydrocasting we regularly saw from refrigerator to small house sized chunks of ice calve off with a tremendous racket. Pretty amazing! -- Sean

Seismic shooting has been going fast and furious. We've collected over 500 miles of data. A lot of the collection has been in fjords with small 6-10 hours shoots. It's amazing that we have coring operations, hydrosweep surveys, and mcs shooting all going on at the same time. It's busy.

I had an interesting problem a few nights ago. We were shooting to a 1.5km streamer when we started drifting off line. A call to the bridge brought about the realization that we had lost propulsion. Apparently the fresh water unit short-circuited and instead of tripping its own breaker tripped a larger one up the line. Propulsion was back in less than 15 minutes, but it was 30 more before the lab had regained its air conditioning. It was starting to get toasty. :-)

Pictured behind Sean and me is the Hubbard glacier. This picture doesn't portray how large this glacier is. We are approximately a mile away from the glacier at this point. From the water, the glacier is over 100 yards tall and stretches horizontally for miles. We sat around for an hour watching chunks of ice that were as big as houses crack off with a sound like loud thunder and crash into the sea below. Pretty amazing. -- Kevin

Wednesday, September 8

1 mile from the end of Muir Inlet in Glacier Bay National Park where we will turn around to deploy the streamer and shoot seismic on the way out. The glaciers in the foreground are two arms of the Muir Inlet. To give you a sense of scale the thickness of the ice at the front is probably 20 meters. In 1976 this same glacier was 3 km further down the channel, in other words the water we are currently sailing in was not there 30 years ago and is now 130 meters deep. Pretty awesome! -- Sean

Sorry for the long interim between messages. We obtained our IHA permit and have shot 6 seismic lines since late last week. The first couple of lines were not without problems. We initially had hardware and software problems in Outer Sitka Sound. After resolving these, we were plagued by bad weather off the Sitka Slope. The last two shoots have been in fjords, Lisianski Inlet and Taiya Inlet and we have had ideal conditions. Data looks good and we have started further processing. When not shooting, we are still coring at breakneck speed. The coring crew is numbering by "number of drops" and we crossed 60 last night. We entered Glacier Bay National Park yesterday. It's hard to believe this was covered by ice less than 100 years ago. Some of the areas we have entered were still marked as land in the digital coastline databases we are using for ship navigation. Pretty wild. -- Kevin

Saturday, September 4

Surveying in Lisianski Inlet. Looking aft: notice the GI gun bubbles in the center and 2m showing of the 750 m long seismic streamer in the foreground. -- Sean

Friday, September 3

Sitka Sound at night... -- Sean