May 3, 2021: Lowered to the Ice
Image courtesy of Caitlin Bailey, GFOE, The Hidden Ocean 2016: Chukchi Borderlands. Download larger version (jpg, 1.9 MB).
The Hidden Ocean 2016: Chukchi Borderlands ice team is lowered in a basket to the ice below from the deck of U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy. The team used a nine-centimeter inner diameter corer attached to an electric drill to remove cores from the ice floe. After a core was retrieved, samples were processed on the ship for physical and chemical measurements of the ice in addition to biological sampling.
The team measured cores for temperature, bulk salinity, nutrients, oxygen isotopes, chlorophyll a, algae, meiofauna, and genomics. Each sample told the scientists something about the ice or its inhabitants.
From: Ice Coring in the Arctic.