Global warming effects us all. Climate change expedition to Disko Bay, Greenland with Cape Farewell, Jarvis Cocker, KT Tunstall and others
“Disko-very Bob” has made it into the West Greenland Current with everything running smoothly – at last! The water column sampling didn’t start well last week (hence lack of my blog) with the failure of the CTD, designed to measure profiles of temperature and salinity to 200m. However what we did see in a test run was that the waters in this part of the ocean show strong inputs of fresh water from the melting glaciers that border the coast.
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Emily Venables introduces Disko-very Bob, launched this morning from the boat and now the UK’s most northerly ARGO float. Over the next few years this remote unit will measure ocean temperature and salinity as it follows the West Greenland current, beaming back information every 5 days by satellite.
Leslie Feist and Dr Simon Boxall feature on the Q Show CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) this Friday 3 October, 10 am (note: Toronto is 5 hours behind UK time). Listen to the podcast on the CBC website.
Oceanographers Simon Boxall and Emily Venables plan the CTD drop, to measure ocean conductivity (salinity), temperature and density.
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We still don’t know if we can expect anything else to be in our container than toothbrushes but we hope to find our ARGO float somewhere in there.
Let me tell you a little more about these fantastic pieces of kit. Observing the ocean is a costly and time consuming business. As our crew will soon find out, dangling a temperature and salinity probe over the side of the boat then hauling it up again takes a while and gives us one single profile of temperature and salinity – a speck in the ocean and a snapshot in time. ARGO floats are like self contained profilers, sinking to whatever depth we tell them to and then travelling along with an ocean current and popping up when we tell them to, transmitting temperature and salinity information back to the ARGOS satellite array, then sinking again for another cycle.
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KT Tunstall, David Buckland and Simon Boxall photographed during the QA, as part of the launch event at the Science Museum, Tuesday 16 September.
Follow the Cape Farewell expedition to the Arctic, the frontline of climate change, with over 40 artists, scientists and musicians including Jarvis Cocker & Ryuichi Sakamoto. 25 Sept to 6 Oct 2008.
