MANA

August 19 2008

Flight Plan

We are schedule to fly from Copenhagen to Reykjavik (Keflavik international airport). We have a 110 kg of extra luggages (good we shipped 400+ kg in July)... From there we have a flight to Akureyri (the second largest icelandic city in the North of the country) where we are staying overnight (August 18). From there, we are flying to Constable point, the "Greenland Air" hub in North East Greenland (with a dash-8). The trip up the coast to Zackenberg is a couple of hours long with a twin-otter. The actual route depends on the destination of the people who take the plane (with possible stops in Mestervig and Dannebrog). There is no fixed timetable; everything depends on the weather. Indeed, the twin otters cannot fly with instruments; a good visibility is thus required. In addition, the clay runways should be dry to allow take off and landing.

Action at Constable Point

The plane from Zackenberg is delayed because of the fog there. We are stuck at Constable point. After a very good meal (and gratis - in an airport!!) , I work on the user manuals while Kirsten and Anders enjoy the sunshine. Suddenly, airport crew start running with their talkie walkie. An helicopter is hovering over the tarmac. It looks like it is having problems. In fact, the pilot spotted a polar bear on its way to the station and is trying to make the bear change its route. It takes us some time to spot the bear who has been running off to the water. At comfortable distance, it is an amazing sight. Three hours in the arctic, I see my first polar bear.

Watch the pilot telling his story.

Arrival at Zackenberg

We beat the fog and land at Zackenberg at 20:30. Everybody is there to welcome us and help with the luggages. All of our packets made it all the way from Copenhagen to Zackenberg. Intact. We are shown to our quarters: the place looks like a summer house; we each have our room. This is luxury. We get to eat the rest from the week-end's VIP party: muskoxe with Ole's sauce + cake + nougat roulade. Brilliant.

Weather predictions

Henrik tells us that the weather prediction is more of the same fog for wed, thu. Nice weather friday. Storm warning for the week-end. As a result, the helicopter planned for wed (day1) will not be available. Plan A is to get the helicopter thu. Henrik proposes a Plan B, which is to use the boat to sail to Dannebrog and get the buoy+mast. We take no decision. Wait and see.

August 20 2008

Helicopter Story

This is a beautiful day. No fog. Henrik tells us that the helicopter should be able to fly today. We should know more at 3pm. We thus decide to spend the morning at the camp and to go to the lake in the afternoon to find the right spot for the mast, and to guide the helicopter. On our way to the lake, we hear the conversation between Henrik and the GEUS people who are using the helicopter: the helicopter is in the South and it is not likely that it will be able to transport our equipment today. Maybe at 7pm. Another VHF conversation is planned for 5pm. At 5pm, the GEUS people say that the pilot is tired and that he does not want to take off with the windy conditions at Dannebrog. The pilot is scheduled to have a day off on thursday, so Friday would be the next day where the helicopter can transport our stuff. Due to the storm warning for Saturday and Sunday, that is possibly the last chance to use the helicopter. Henrik negociates that it will go to the lake with our equipment first thing in the morning on Friday, i.e., at around 8am. There is nothing we can do about this. I am just happy we still have a chance to use the helicopter. Friday (day 3) will be a long day!!

Boat story

With the risk of the helicopter not flying on Friday, Henrik asks if we are interested in taking some of the stuff (e.g., the buoy) from Dannebrog to Zackenberg by boat. He is sailing there on thursday after dropping off Jacob and Geyrnot at Cavering island. Kirsten and I talk about this, and we decide against taking the buoy to the camp. The rationale is the following. By taking the buoy to Zackenberg on thursday, we have 4 days to bring it up to the lake and install it - regardless of what happens with the helicopter. What we also get is a situation where we need to transport the 40kg+ buoy from Zackenberg to the lake, along a rocky, 5km road. Our decision is thus to bet on the helicopter.

At the lake

The buoy that Kirsten placed in March is still there. It is a bit oblique in the water - probably because it has moved and now touches the ground. We need the boat to get the buoy, we decide to wait until the new buoy is assembled to do so. The shield protecting the WQM sensor will allow the Capoh buoy to function even if it moves and is grounded at the bottom of the lake.

Arctic drilling

The battery based drilling machine that Birger Hansen loaned us works as advertised. We are able to drill a hole in a large stone that will serve as anchor for the buoy (25 cm in diameter, approx. 10 kg). We also drill 1 1/2 holes for the baduljer anchor. A big thanks to Birger Hansen and Mikkel Tarmsdorf!!

Finding the mast position

We spend an hour looking at the stones, trying to find the best location for the base station. We opt quickly for the south of the Langemand lake. To my surprise there is line of sight to the camp - which is only 4 km away. Getting a wifi connection from the mast to the camp should not be too much of a problem!

Lepidimus arcticus

On our way back from the lake, Kirsten stops by vesterportsø to check on the lepidimus. Interesting creatures! Check out the video.

August 21 2008

Morning at the camp

I test the connection between the microserver and the motor control box that Ole has prepared. We use the microserver to generate a 3,3 V, 4mA high, that the control box transforms into a signal with an intensity that is well-suited for the motor. The signal brings the solar panel down in a face down position so that it can resist wind, ice and snow in Winter. When there is enough sun radiation the solar panel starts to generate current, a small part of which is used by the motor to turn the solar panel back to the production position (15 degrees). Based on the numbers from Geobasis (thanks Charlotte!), I decide to program the microserver to generate the signal every evening in the first two weeks of November and every evening from mid-January to mid-March.

Afternoon at the lake

We drill two and half more holes for the guy-wires. We still have four and half holes to drill (guy-wire anchors plus the foot of the mast). We cannot do that with a single battery. Back at the camp, Charlotte suggests that we take a small generator up to the lake. Henrik says that he has a medium-sized generator that we can take.

Evening volleyball

At 10pm, we get to play volleyball in this beautiful landscape.

August 22 2008

Helicopter is on

8:30am, green light for the helicopter. We scramble to get ready. Kirsten runs to the lake to make sure the helicopter drops the packages at the right place. Anders and I prepare our backsack: Anders takes all the electronic, I take the generator and the sensor. We have used day1 and day2 to transport the rest of the equipment up to the lake.

Watch the video.

Drop off

The pilot of the helicopter is flying to a wrong GPS position, Kirsten needs radio contact with him to guide him to the place where the drop off should take place. The helicopter lands as it carried the solar panel and the batteries in the cockpit. All the equipment is in good stand and at the right place, we just have to assemble it now.

Assembly #1

Anders and I arrive at the lake at 11:30 after a slow walk. We start with the holes for the mast. As expected
we need to recharge batteries using the generator. While the batteries are recharging, we assemble the buoy. The first step is to fix the WQM sensor. The problem is that I miss the right umbraco (my daughters have been playing with them :) - I use gaffa around a smaller umbracco. It takes some time but the sensor gets properly fixed. The rest of the buoy assembly goes without problems. Ole has really designed a system that requires a foolproof assembly. Back to the mast, Anders drills the last hole, we place epoxy and the four expansion bolts. We have to wait a bit for the expoxy to dry before we can adjust and secure the foot position (that will be tomorrow). The next stop is to assemble the batteries. Before we do so, we need to find out where to place the flight case. We find a good place, where the flight case is horizontal and close to the mast. I want to check that all cables can reach the flight case. That is when I realize that I have forgotten the antenna cables. I somehow thought that they were attached to the mast and they slipped my attention at home. Same thing with the guy-wires, I thought we had shipped them - but they are not there. We have wire enough for the guy-wires, the antenna cables are a more acute problem Øv... Back to work, we assemble the batteries. They are heavy (30 kg each, they are 6 of them) but we are careful and we assemble them right the first time so that we do not need to lift them more than necessary. Back to the mast, we adjust the bolts so that the foot is attached to the underlying stone and remains horizontal. Our time is up, we will need to complete the installation (guy-wires, solar panel, microserver) tomorrow.

Cable guy

Back to the camp, Tower is installing the new Iridium system. I climb on the roof of house #5 to check the antenna cable. It is the same type we are using. Tower promises to check whether they have extra cables of this type. And they have a spare, which Henrik says we can use. Problem solved. Thanks Henrik!

Happy birthday Niels

Niels Martin celebrates his birthday by thrashing the rest of us at Trivial Pursuit - with some intermittent help from Ole Frø.

August 23 2008

Assembly #2

The weather is not as good as the previous days. There is a storm warning for the afternoon. The first thing we do is to adjust the guy-wires so that they are in tension. We do so while checking that the mast is vertical. It is not 100% vertical, but I judge that it won't get much better. The mast is very solidly anchored. I don' t think it will go anywhere. Next step is to mount the solar panel. I first connect the power cables to the solar panel. Then I connect the motor cables to the junction box that Ole has prepared. Now, the motor gets power from the solar panel. Lastly, I attach an antenna with its cable (the other antenna will need to be mounted in October). We then put the solar panel on the mast. With the wind, it is a bit of a tricky operation. We have placed the solar panel in its face down position so that it offers the least resistence to the wind. Once again, the design from Ole makes it possible/effortless to secure the solar panel and adjust its position. Kirsten turns the contact that manages the direction in which the motor is rotating. Immediately the solar panel goes from the face down position to its face-upposition. It is so great that everything works as designed. The wind gains in strength and it is cold. Before we go back to the camp, I install the embedded linux board inside the microserver, power it up and connect the wifi bridge (via the amplifier) to the antenna. The microserver is configured in such a way, that it is turned on - with the wifi powered up - for 10 mins, then drops dead and sleep for 20 minutes.

Wifi connectivity

Back at the camp, I check the connectivity. I can see the microserver on the list of wireless networks -
even when I refresh the list (the signal strength is 2/6 bars in the windows GUI). It is time for lunch and I
leave it at that. If confirmed, this opens up great possibilities!!! Over lunch the wind increase in strength
(aroun 10ms). In the evening the storm is on (14/15 ms) and I have no connectivity to the microserver. I run a connectivity test all night, where I ping the microserver every five minutes. The test turns out negative, there is no connection all night. Either it is because of the weather (humidity is at around 80% - the lake appears to be in the clouds - the wind is strong), because of the distance to the microserver (and my initial test was misleading). or because something went wrong.

Activ

The three mast Activ arrived in the Zackenberg bay in the morning. A beautiful sight. In the afternoon, its crew comes up to Zackenberg to get a tour of the facility. We take up the opportunity to take them back to their boat with Anders and Henrik. such a three mast, in a remote place such as Zackenberg is quite incredible.

August 24 2008

Storm

The wind has been strong all night. It is stable at 15ms in average. It is raining as well. We expect the wind to be much stronger at the lake. The storm that Henrik told us about when we arrived has materialized. No way we can work in these conditions. We just have to wait. I take a tour of the geobasis installations with Laura and Charlotte. Henrik says that the weather should remain stormy until monday night. This is not good news.

Geobasis

The geobasis equipment includes 2 climate masts (one with a satellite link, the other with a cable link to house 5 at the camp). a snow height station, a methane and carbon dioxyd station. Data loggers (all from Campbell scientific) are connect to the sensors or to a box which is in charge of analyzing air samples. A couple of stations contain a laptop which is used to configure the data logger (via its serial port). Data is retrieved from the data loggers using USB keys. Laura and Charlotte must take a walk to the data loggers to find out whether they need maintenance (due to the storm).

A thought for Marcus

Our lightweight equipment (basically the electronics and Kirsten's field equipment) is in the dry lab. This is a lab we share with Biobasis. More specifically, Ditte is using it to store her samples of Muskoxe excrements. After having spent days collecting them, she is drying them and sorting them. It stinks!

It is not as bad as a pig farm, but it is getting there. After the Hogthrob setup at the pig farm, I promised Marcus that he would get fresh air for his next deployment. I thought North East Greenland would be perfect. I was wrong :)

Watch the video clip of the lab.

Zackenberg Bookshelf

The bookshelf in our quarters is full of polar stories. I go for a novel though ("Mænd der hader kvinder" or in english "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo") which I had not taken the time to read yet.

August 25 2005

Storm

The storm is still going strong. It turns out that the worst is not the wind but the rain. Charlotte and Laura monitor the level of the water in the river that we must cross to access the lake: it was 9cm the last weeks (we could cross by foot with a neoprene suit) - and it has risen to 75 cm - making it impossible to cross by foot and difficult to cross with the boat and cable system designed to that effect. We still cannot go to the lake today. I have programmed the spare microserver so that it is in production mode (i.e., duty cycled to sleep 12 hours, awake for 10 min - configured with the MAC address of the mote embedded in the buoy - with all traces on). I spend the day reading and writing the manuals.

Flight back

We are schedule to fly back tomorrow. However, due to the storm no plane has been flying today. In the evening, Henrik cancels the weigh in and tells us that we will not fly tomorrow. We might be able to fly on Wednesday. It is a week now that my wife has been alone with our three small children. I am eager to fly home.

August 26 2008

Plans

This is our last chance to get the buoy in the lake, start the microserver and secure the base station. The weather is not good and I look back on what we should have done differently. We have not been able to work at the lake since Saturday. Obviously we took a chance when we decided to only spend one week this summer and get back in October. If we are not able to go to the lake today, we will have to prepare for Anders and Tower to get there later on and prepare the system for the two months until October when Kirsten and Marcus will be back at Zackenberg.

River to cross

The level of the river has now reached 75 cm. The wind is not as strong as during the week-end. This should be our last day at Zackenberg, so we want to try and cross the river to get access to the lake. Tower, Niels and Henrik have come to help. At 11am Kirsten has a try. It looks tough, the boat takes some water. Henrik calls her back. He thinks that she can barely make it and that I will not be able to cross. We agree to try again at 3pm.

At 2:30 pm we have a conversation with Henrik. The level of the river is still as high as in the morning. The wind is the same. Crossing the river has not gotten easier. Henrik makes it clear that he does not want me to try and cross the river in these conditions because (i) I have never tried anything similar before and because (ii) he cannot get medical help if something happens. This is not a situation I am happy with. The first lesson here is that anything can happen in North-East Greenland. The second lesson is that I stand in the way of the project. Henrik confirms that he would let Anders, Tower and Kirsten cross the river. All flights have been cancelled for today, so it is likely that we will not fly out tomorrow. It is very likely that we have one more day to deploy the buoy.

I thus write down the instructions for (i) turning on the buoy, (ii) deploying the buoy, (iii) securing the mast, and (iv) turning on the microserver. I show the microserver setup to Tower. I feel like Ole from Dan-system who has prepared most of the system, but did not get to install it.

New plan

In the evening, Henrik tells us about a new plan - anything can happen in North-East Greenland. Jacob and Gernot are on Activ, who picked them up from Cavering island. They are on their way back to Zackenberg. The plan is that a dinghy will take them from Activ to Zackenberg and that on the way back, the dinghy will drop us off on the shore - on the side of the river that will allow us to access the lake (After a slightly longer walk). When we are done, we can go back to the "fangstation", a little house on the shore which hunters used to live in. We get ready, get lights and sleeping bags. Then we wait. Niels is ripping his opponents at Trivial Pursuit. At 11pm, Henrik tells us that the plan is cancelled. I can join the loser team at Trivial Pursuit.

Flight back

There should be some flights tomorrow, but it is not clear that there will be seats for (some of) us. We are 5 scheduled to leave Zackenberg. A priori, two flights should land at Zackenberg bringing Jørgen from DPC, a team of students from Svalbad and a guest for Activ (they should have arrived yesterday). The plane should take back some of the Activ guests and hopefully (some of) us.

August 27 2008

Standby

I choose to spend the day in standby at Zackenberg. I do not want to miss an opportunity to fly home. During the day I see two flights come and go. The one take a handful of GEUS folk (the rest of the Activ folk must spend one more day onboard) on its way to Dannebrog and back to Constable point. The other one fly further north and takes no passengers.

A long day

Henrik decides to execute the plan from last night in the morning. Anders and Kirsten are on the shore at 8am. The dinghy from Activ picks them up and drop them off on the shore (on the other side of the river). They have one hour walk to the lake. They have all the instructions I prepared yesterday. Kirsten has plumbing experience so I am sure she will tighten the on-off capsule appropriately so that it is water-tight. The riskier part of the plan is the microserver set-up as neither Kirsten nor Anders has much experience with the internals of a computer. The trick is to start the embedded system. To do that Rob Fatland has devised a simple procedure, that still involves plugging in and out some cables. All of them are labelled (thanks Rob!). We agreed that they would call on the radio in case of problems.

I spend the day in the lounge, working on MANA slides. At 11am Tower comes with the radio. Kirsten cannot find cable C010. They look again and find it. A few minutes later, Kirsten calls again telling me that nothing happens when she plugs the power cable onto the linux board. I tell her to repeat the operations from scratch (unplugging the internal and external power source and plugging them again). I do not hear from her again.

I keep on monitoring the level of the river to see if Anders and Kirsten can cross it. The river is stable at 65 cm. Lower than yesterday but still high.

In the afternoon, I loan the Biobasis telescope (that Lars has been using to count Muskoxe). I can see Anders and Kirsten working close to the base station (it later turned out that they were painting it). It is a frustrating experience.

At 5pm I see Kirsten and Anders packing their bags and taking their way back. I see a Muskoxe on their way. With the telescope it is hard to say how close they are. My guess is 20 meters. Kirsten calls on the radio to say they are on their way.

At 6pm, I cannot wait any longer. I ask Henrik to call Kirsten on the radio. Henrik turns the radio to me so that I can ask how things are. Kirsten says that they have turned on the buoy, deployed it, configured the microserver, turned it on and secured it. That is mission accomplished!! Thanks Kirsten!

The pictures

Anders and Kirsten are waiting at the "fangstation". The plan is that people from Zackenberg should take the dinghys to visit Activ. This requires two trips. Anders and Kirsten will be picked up on the way back from the first trip. The first round is planned for 7:30 pm. At 8pm I see Anders on the telescope walking back from the shore. Kirsten has decided to visit Activ. She has so much energy!!

Anders is tired but happy. The trip back from the lake has been a bit long as they have brought back the red buoy (Kirsten deployed in March). Once inside, Anders shows me the pictures. They are great!

Kirten arrives with the rest of the folks at 11pm. She tells us about the day, shows us the pictures (the one below taken from 20m up one mast of Activ!) and goes back to work - she has a couple of analysis to make at the lab. Woaw...

Flight back

Henrik tells us that we might fly back tomorrow afternoon. Weather permitting.

August 28 2008

Flight back

The weather is ok. There is good visibility. Looks like we are flying back today. The Activ guests arrive in the morning - they are flying back with us.

October

I leave some equipment for Marcus in October. The goal then will be to analyze the data and trace collected by the system, to fix problems and complete the system installation and secure it for the winter. There might also be time for experiments (wifi, use of IP serial nodes with other data loggers). The todo list is already significant. We have accomplished a lot already, but there is still work to do.

Flying back

We fly from Zackenberg at 4pm. There are some clouds so not much of the coast to see from the twin otter. Most of us take a nap. At Constable point, we get our flight schedule to Copenhagen. We have a direct flight from Constable point to Keflavik at 9pm. From there we have a red eye that leaves Keflavik at 1am (local time) and arrives in Copenhagen on Friday at 7am.

There is GSM coverage at Constable point (since the week-end) so we can send sms home to tell the news. We meet at Constable point some of the people we met on our way up. In particular a team from Colorado/Oslo tells the story of how they spent 96 hours in a snow storm, inside one tent which was threaning to collapse under the very high wind, snow and ice. They had to wait 4 days in these conditions before a helicopter could rescue them.