However there is a slim window, a matter of weeks at the height of summer when it is possible to find a way through the gauntlet of islands and get across to the North Atlantic. Few have completed the trip, and the first known explorer to successfully navigate starting from the Pacific Ocean needed three years to do it. It is one of the most recent triumphs in the history of ocean exploration, achieved only about 100 years ago - while cartographers have had most other waterways documented for hundreds of years.

Although the Arctic may look as if frozen for eternity, global warming has significantly changed conditions in the region; in the century since the first successful crossing, only about one hundred ships have navigated the Northwest Passage. The summer of 2009 was the third consecutive year that enough ice had melted for vessels to safely get through. There is evidence to suggest that more ships will make regular trips across northern Canada in the future.

There are few intrepid explorers that have made this trip, and fewer still have done so with such advanced navigational equipment as that on board Ocean Watch, the 64-foot steel sailboat that is the heart and home of the ongoing Around the Americas expedition.

Ocean Watch in Alaska. Photo by David Thoreson, Around the Americas.

The route and ports of call for Ocean Watch.

The boat started from Seattle, Washington on May 31, 2009 on an approximately 13-month voyage that will sail about 24,000 nautical-miles, circumnavigating the American continents with a permanent crew of four experienced sailors, and a rotating complement of onboard scientists and educators. The primary aim of the mission is to raise global awareness of the ocean’s health, and to motivate Americans of both hemispheres to actively engage in protecting our shared resource. Around the Americas is unique in the way it brings together ocean travel, science research, and environmental education. The project provides a rare, long-term view of the ocean while traversing extremes, literal and otherwise. The ship was built to withstand the brutal Northwest Passage, as well as reliably cruise long distances in varying conditions, literally from one end of the planet to the other, and back. Furthermore the planned ports of call range in size from the village of Barrow, Alaska, home to about 4,400 people, to the 10 million-strong in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil.[1]

Zeta Strickland, the first onboard educator to join Ocean Watch. Photo by David Thoreson, Around the Americas.

I spoke with one recent Arctic traveler, Zeta Strickland, who climbed aboard in Barrow, Alaska as Around the America’s first onboard educator. Prior to joining Ocean Watch, Zeta’s boating experience was limited to a few hours on a small sailboat on Lake Washington – but she quickly adapted to life at sea. Zeta has worked at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, Washington for almost 10 years. The facility provides hands-on science education for visiting school groups, youth groups, and summer camps, in addition to offsite programs. As director of the Science Outreach division, Zeta oversees the Science on Wheels program, for which she was a traveling educator for a few years. Science on Wheels brings the education resources to schools’ assemblies, creating hands-on workshops on-the-spot. The projects range among all the sciences: geology, astronomy, biology-the school can choose a subject and the team of traveling teachers will set up a mini-museum. Zeta half-joked that Ocean Watch’s Captain and Around the Americas Project Director Mark Schrader “had a pool of teachers used to the nomadic lifestyle” to invite to join the expedition.

Zeta in her survival suit - training purposes only! Photo by David Thoreson, Around the Americas.

Zeta brought her teaching experience to Ocean Watch, helping develop educational materials for the project and for the port-stops around the continents. During those short stops on land, she led visits to school assemblies as well as teaching ship visitors about the vessel, the importance and nature of the expedition, and the state of ocean health. In larger cities, when school is in session, the crew generally works more closely with teachers to plan hands-on activities. Throughout the expedition the Around the Americas website also allows anyone to “tap in from anywhere,” according to Zeta. There are activity sets available for teachers to download from the Around the Americas website for the classroom about environmental concepts such as ocean acidification and food web ecology, in both English and Spanish.  In addition to the educational component of the mission, Zeta also worked as part of the crew to help do chores, cook, read sea-ice charts, and generally shared in the duties with everyone else on board.

Arctic iceberg. Photo by David Thoreson, Around the Americas.

An example of 2/10ths pack ice. Photo by David Thoreson, Around the Americas.

When the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen made the same trek through the Northwest Passage, it took him three years (1903-1906) to get all the way through. When blocked by impassably thick ice, Amundsen overwintered in an Inuit town called Gjoa Haven, so named for the relative comfort it offered his ship, Gjoa, after steering through the hazardous waters of Simpson Strait. (If you imagine that the path Ocean Watch traveled is shaped like an ice-cream-scoop, lying scoop-down across Canada - a straight line with a large bump on the most eastern end - Gjoa Haven is situated just after Simpson Strait, and just before the scoop.) Amundsen passed the time conducting research on the location of the geomagnetic northpole. In his August 20, 2009 crew log entry, Ocean Watch’s Captain Mark Schrader noted the admiration he shares with the crew for Amundsen’s navigational talent. To safely pass through the gauntlet of islands, shoals, and rocks in addition to the ever-changing seascape of ice floes – without the advantages of “charts, chart plotter(s), radar, depth sounder(s), GPS, wind instruments and satellite ice reports” – was enough to inspire great respect.

9/10ths pack ice. Photo by David Thoreson, Around the Americas.

Zeta echoed this appreciation of Amundsen’s success, noting many other benefits the crew of Ocean Watch had during their journey that were unavailable for the historic voyage over a century earlier. She and the crew enjoyed email and a freezer full of fresh fruits and vegetables, and a powerful water filter to produce plenty of fresh water, among other amenities. Perhaps most important psychologically speaking, Ocean Watch sailed where people had sailed before, and the crew knew there was a way out through all that ice. Even with this in mind “it was still a little nerve-wracking.”

Canadian Ice Service Chart. Blue is clear water, red is 9/10ths impassable ice; green (1-3/10ths) and yellow (4-6/10ths) are the most navigable routes.

Although Zeta is probably one of few women to have ever traveled the passage, most people disregard this historic quirk to focus on the gender-ratio of the crew during her leg of the trip: Zeta lived with five men, in a tight space, for about two months. From the day she was confirmed to join the crew in from Barrow, to the recent few months since she disembarked, Zeta has been asked repeatedly if she had concerns being the only woman on board. When I asked, she brushed off the issue as immaterial. “There were so many other things to think about, gender was so not the only thing on my mind. Everything would be so new, gender was irrelevant.” Around the Americas’ mission on the whole is much more important to her than something as relatively trivial as the number of women on board. Instead, she said the hardest part was being the least experienced at sea among the crew. At sea, “everything is just a little bit different from the norm – even tying your shoes in the morning,” and Zeta had to learn how to live on a boat along the way, among salty sailors with the combined nautical-mileage of several circles around the globe.

The crew in the Canadian Arctic. Photo by David Thoreson, Around the Americas.

Even if gender had been a concern for anyone on board, there was always plenty of work to be done to keep oneself distracted. Besides interpreting ice charts and cooking meals, crewmembers share responsibility for conducting science research. At-sea research is generally performed under entirely different conditions: scientific research ships often go out on intensive 2-3 week legs with a very specific subject of focus, collect a large quantity of samples, and return to port. Though there may be multiple trips, research is often completed during a particular season, or in one limited region. However as Zeta put it, “not much science is usually done on a 64-foot vessel – there’s no room for it. Everything is very small.” Ocean Watch would also be sailing through all the latitudes and a wide-range of ecosystems. The Around the Americas team therefore got creative when planning the kind of research that was practical onboard Ocean Watch.

Captain Mark Schrader helps steer Ocean Watch through sea ice. Photo by David Thoreson, Around the Americas.

Captain and Project Director Mark Schrader worked with members of various institutions to examine the project’s unique advantages for research. The most obvious one is the atypical route, which allowed Ocean Watch’s crew to contribute to ongoing research in the atmospheric and oceanic sciences, in collaboration with many supportive research institutions. There are a number of projects happening onboard, and one in particular involves, NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.  In 1997, NASA launched “S’COOL,” a program to study the role of clouds and the energy cycle in global climate change. S’COOL stands for “Students’ Cloud Observations On-Line,” and it encourages science students to engage in cutting-edge climate research. Students all over the world can record observations of cloud formations at the exact time a NASA satellite in orbit passes overhead, photographing the earth’s surface. The students’ ground observations are compared against those collected from satellites to verify the accuracy of satellite imagery – a process called “ground-truthing” – and the more observations, the more accurately scientists can interpret satellite data. (One might call this method for data collection a type of citizen science by crowd-sourcing in today’s lexicon.) The crew of Ocean Watch is supplementing NASA’s dataset considerably by regularly documenting cloud formations en-route, in locations where most S’COOL contributors cannot travel.

Anvil cloud. Photo by David Thoreson, Around the Americas.

Illustrating NASA's S'COOL Program, which helps researchers interpret satellite imagery for applications in climate and atmospheric sciences.

Example of SCOOL cloud observation record.

Around the Americas is an ambitious project, and the mission is still underway. After her experience on Ocean Watch, Zeta still feels very much a part of it and she continues tracking the ship’s progress through the daily crew log.  Zeta’s time at sea made her much more aware of how we use resources. As she adjusted to life back on land in Seattle, everything from drinking water to garbage disposal took on a new significance. As she described it, the water maker and electrical generator aboard Ocean Watch both make a lot of noise individually, and due to the way the pumping system works, both start up whenever water is used.  Such a racket was strong incentive for the crew to use the bare minimum amount of water necessary. Furthermore, between ports of call, the crew collected any trash they produced and waited to dispose of it properly on land. It is fair to say that living with a growing amount of garbage for extended periods would heighten anyone’s awareness of the volume of waste people generate.

When we spoke, Zeta had only been home for a few weeks, but she hoped to incorporate much of what she learned into her work at the Pacific Science Center. Following up after our conversation in an email, she explained that her involvement significantly altered her view of, and her relationship with the oceans. Some of the joy of being a part of Around the Americas is the opportunity Zeta now has to share her experience with others. She wants to help develop the relationship between the public and environmental research, illustrating the science with human stories, because as she put it, “it’s hard to connect with a graph.”

Ice and clouds in the Arctic. Photo by David Thoreson, Around the Americas.

There is a great deal that everyone can learn from the Around the Americas expedition. Ocean Watch has just reached Peru, and continues sailing north along the west coast of South America. Follow the ongoing expedition, see some fantastic photography, and learn more about the mission, the ship, and her sturdy crew at www.AroundtheAmericas.org.

Thank you to Zeta Strickland and the Around the Americas team!

[1] Population estimates from: City of Barrow website, http://www.cityofbarrow.org; Brazilian Tourism Portal, www.braziltour.com.

]]> http://www.talkingscience.org/2010/03/around-the-americas/feed/ 7 http://www.talkingscience.org/2010/02/know-your-waterways/ http://www.talkingscience.org/2010/02/know-your-waterways/#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:25:27 +0000 Sharon Benjamin http://www.talkingscience.org/?p=3588

Thomas H. Poppleton, Plan of the City of New York, 1817. NYPL, Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division

In honor of the 400^th anniversary of Henry Hudson sailing into New York’s waters, the New York Public Library presents a beautiful selection of maps spanning the 17^th through 21^st centuries – ranging from maps that Hudson would have used, to a dynamic satellite map supported by Google.  The collection offers an overview of the region’s earliest exploration and how maps of the region have changed through the years.

The NYPL is home to one of the largest and most well used map collections in the world, according to my enthusiastic and knowledgeable docent. The exhibit includes unique images of the five boroughs, with views of Manhattan and Brooklyn seen from intriguing angles. These illustrations force you to think differently about the history of development in context of the river named after its most famous European explorer. The exhibit frames the development of New York in terms of its waterways – from the trade encouraged by sheltering harbors and the river extending north, to the fresh drinking water that allows so many people to live here.

A few highlights:

John Bachmann. New York & Environs. New York, 1859. NYPL, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Print Collection, Eno Collection

• At the very beginning of the exhibit, take a look at the four circular views of New York that center on Manhattan. My favorite is an image drawn by John Bachman (1859) which focuses on the very tip of Manhattan and Governor’s Island, as if seen through a fisheye lens.
• Walk along the Hudson all the way to Albany by following an impressive floor-appliqué in the middle of the exhibit.
• Keep an eye out for some of the more beautiful maps, such as The Hudson River and Its Watershed, from the Beacon Institute (2007). Its detailed decorative frame illustrates topics in the river’s history such as exploration, recreation, and industry.

Connie Brown. The Hudson River and Its Watershed, 2007. The Beacon Institute. NYPL, Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division.

• Also keep an eye out for Interpretive Cartography, a fun 1947 map of Long Island that is full of cultural iconography (such as fishermen, lighthouses and lobsters) drawn in the familiar style of Richard Scarry. (You may remember his books from your childhood – a worm wearing a single sneaker, and cats in lederhosen.)

The exhibit also looks at the revitalization of the waterways that carried the burden of pollution from intense industrial activity that made New York a center of trade.  Look at the brightly colored 1922 map of New York City’s myriad industries: leather goods, printing and publishing, women’s wear, and many others, proudly highlighted by city block. Factories dumped great volumes of chemical waste into the waterways for decades, damaging the ecosystems and restricting the general public from accessing the waterfront. The effort to bring the public back to the water has involved legislation to limit or stop pollution, actively cleaning up the river, and increasing public access to waterfront property, including the beach. Take a look at the cheerful 1941 map of NYC-area beaches, with little flags to note their quality as Good, Bad, or Fair. This refers to the cleanliness of the beach, and the intensity of overflow from sewage treatment plants during storm surges, which continue polluting certain areas today.

Industrial map of New York City showing Manufacturing industries concentration. 1922. NYPL, Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division.

I recommend taking advantage of the free guided-tours of the exhibit. Besides learning a lot about New York’s history, you may also enjoy some bizarre questions from other visitors. I was lucky to overhear the docent politely handling heated accusations from an older gentleman who was convinced that Brooklyn is “not attached” to Long Island. Thankfully the docent had a wide selection of evidence supporting his argument.

The NYPL gives visitors a glimpse into how Henry Hudson and the earliest European traders coming to the New World saw the region. It was fascinating to see the changes in map design and style over time, and watch the shorelines come into focus from the earliest, imprecise first impressions of Hudson, to highly accurate English maps from the 18^th century. The exhibit gives New Yorkers and visitors from all over a chance to see the city in a new way, with views of Manhattan before the skyscrapers, and a better appreciation for the city’s visual history.

Visit Mapping New York’s Shoreline: 1609-2009 in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at 5th Avenue at 42nd Street, at the New York Public Library, through June 26, 2010.

Exhibit is open Monday, Thursday-Saturday, 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.; Tuesday-Wednesday 10 a.m. – 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, 1-5 p.m.

Free public tours are offered Monday through Saturday at 12:30 and 2:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3:30 p.m.

Images included here at the courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Until April 2009, most of my hands-on experience with marine life had been limited to scrubbing algae from the walls of my freshwater aquarium. Then one day I found myself onboard a NOAA ship, dissecting Atlantic cod, winter skates, and yellowtail flounder, and up to my elbows in fish slime – and I could not have been happier.

The Fisheries and Ecosystems Monitoring and Analysis Division (FEMAD), of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, has conducted bottom trawl surveys as part of NOAA since the 1960s. These surveys collect valuable information each fall and spring on fish populations, as well as meteorological and oceanographic data. I participated in April 2009 as a volunteer scientist on a 10-day cruise, just one leg of the 10-week survey.

To survey the populations of marine species, research vessels tow large fishing nets in specific locations off the northeast coast; the catch is dumped into a large bin (a hopper), and everything is sorted into buckets and baskets by species. Eventually, anything pulled aboard is weighed and measured individually. This quickly becomes a vast and thorough data set, because hundreds of fish and other marine species may be brought aboard in a single tow. In a 12-hour shift, the ship’s Chief Scientist will aim to complete between 5 to 10 tows. After only a 10-day cruise, that’s a lot of fish.

Although called a cruise, these trips are anything but a vacation. Survey ships are active twenty-four hours a day, with two teams of scientists working in 12-hour shifts. I was on the day shift, which means I worked from noon to midnight. Coordinating as a team to be efficient, the scientists must immediately identify each fish species carried along on a small conveyor belt, grab the slimy creatures, and separate them into buckets. It is both physically and intellectually demanding labor. The challenge is to think and move fast, and especially to take care when picking up the spinier species, with the conveyor belt continuously carrying more fish down the line, all the while standing on a rocking boat – for a long shift. After the fish were sorted, we weighed and measured each one at computer workstations in the wet lab. Depending on the research being conducted on each species, we also gathered additional information, including the individual’s sex, maturity, stomach contents, and the weight of some internal organs.

The information collected on these voyages contributes to an enormous data set on fish populations off the Northeast coast. NOAA scientists use this data to study a wide range of topics in regards to the sustainable management of marine resources, which I will discuss in a future post. Thanks for reading!