Well, following our extremely smooth resupply, it was inevitable that we have at least a few mishaps here on the ice. 

First off, Charlie managed to break an unbreakable ice-pick chopping away at some ice. But I suppose that’s ex-army types for you - well hard! 

Then Martin ‘The Rhino’ Hartley struck again, this time managing to scupper one of his skis. We’re not entirely sure how, but it means that we now have two Russian friends travelling with us – Mr Brokenski and the remaining Mr Spareski, both of whom are hitching a ride on Martin’s sledge. 

There was also a mix-up with mine and Charlie’s food rations which took us a while to sort out last night, but all sorted now.  

However, last night we camped up by a boulder of ice that, we all agreed as soon as we saw it, looked remarkably like a large monkey….. that makes four of us now I guess! 

Posted by Ann Daniels, Expedition Leader 

We’ve made good progress northwards over the past few days, so I’m happy to report that morale is excellent. 

We travelled across very old and thick ice for the majority of the day, I can’ tell you what a nice change this made. For the past few days we’ve had our hearts in our mouths as we tentatively crossed very thin new ice that could give way like a trap-door at any point.  

The strong easterly wind, although bitingly-cold, produced beautiful spindrift patterns across the surface of the Arctic Ocean that were highlighted by the glorious sunshine. 

We’re expecting to be re-supplied any day now. It’ll be great to hold of some fresh kit, the odd luxury and off-load all of the water samples that we’ve been laboriously collecting over the past 18 days.  

Posted by Ann Daniels, Expedition Leader

It's been another unusual day’s travel for us. We’re continuing to see some really large leads of freshly refrozen water all around us. As you’ll know from the audio blog I left a couple of days ago, at one point I found myself wriggling across a 15-metre stretch of ice that was only a centimeter or so thick. Very elegant! 

We’ve nicknamed the thin ice ‘flippy floppy’ ice. It bends, bounces wobbles as we pass over it. There’s also a lot of movement, breakage and shifting in the ice this year. We’re all highly experienced, but we’re all in agreement that it’s simply the strangest behaviour we’ve ever seen. 

As well as the great stretches of open water, we’re also experiencing some rather frustrating drifting that’s hampering our progress northwards. It’s got to the point at which I’d rather turn the GPS off in the evening than watch the figures click away, indicating that we’re steadily move back in the direction from which we’ve come! 

But morale is good because, on the plus side, we’ve managed to undertake all the science we’d hoped to at this point. 

Provided by Ann Daniels, Expedition Leader

A couple of bitterly cold days out on the has prompted Ann to talk about the importance of food on the expedition. 

Listen to her audio blog here

Well, it’s 06:38 local time and we’ve just spent our first night on the floating sea ice. Although it’s been over 300 days since we were last on the Arctic Ocean, it somehow feels like we’ve never been away! 

The drop off was completely smooth, with the Twin Otter landing on a refrozen lead of water. We did have to deviate from our original proposed start point (around 85^ON) as we spotted too many cracks and unfrozen leads as we flew over. 

Once we’d waved off the plane (and stared into the jaws of the Arctic wondering what on earth we’d all been thinking!) we trekked for around one nautical mile, just to stretch the legs before setting up camp for the night. 

Despite the temperature being -38^OC yesterday, conditions actually feel surprisingly pleasant compared to last year, and it’s blowing a nice breeze. Probably just the Arctic lulling us into a false sense of security! 

Morale is high and we’re all raring to go. We’ve already started some of the scientific data capture that forms the crux of this mission, and we hope to complete some more this morning before starting the day’s trek. 

Oh, and we’ve also broken a snow shovel already. Let’s hope that’s the only thing that goes wrong on this trip! 

Anyway, had better get back to it now that the snow is melting for breakfast. Keen to get out there and take advantage of this glorious weather. You never know what the heavens might throw at us tomorrow….

Dictated by Ann Daniels, Expedition Leader

This week I’ve not only been taking part in the training programme for the scientist, which consists of familiarising ourselves with equipment, the cold, living in tents and safety while we’re out on the ice base; but also this has been a great opportunity to go through the equipment that the explorers are taking with them and making sure not only that it works in this extreme environment, but also that the explorers are happy knowing how to use it all. 

We [the scientists] have asked the explorers to take a couple of different measurements for us. These include using a CTD (conductivity, temperature and depth) meter and taking samples of the seawater using a Kemmerer bottle. The CTD is a lovely compact robust piece of equipment that we lower down through an ice hole into the seawater on a wire or rope. The explorers have to do nothing with it except look after it and keep a nice steady rate of about 1 m per 10 seconds while they are lower it down and bringing it up. This allows us to create a profile of the water column showing how salty it is (salinity, which is measured using conductivity) and what temperature it is at each depth. This is really useful information for telling us what the ocean conditions are like, for example, whether there is warm water coming up under the ice or whether there is salty cold water sinking down from the ice to the deeper ocean.

The Kemmerer bottle is basically a cylinder with two open ends, which have lids that snap shut when they are triggered. This means that we can lower the bottle on a wire to the depth that we want to take a water sample from then send a weight down the wire (a messenger) which triggers the bottle, closing the ends and trapping the water. This sounds simple enough, but at temperatures of -25 oC and below these simple procedures become incredibly tricky. For a start, once the bottle has been returned to the surface there is a small tap at the bottom with a tube attached which we use to get the water out of the bottle. In the cold, if the water is not allowed to keep moving it freezes almost immediately. So we had to make a bigger hole in the tap and develop a technique for holding the bottle as it comes out the water to make sure that the seawater is never allowed to stay still for more than just a moment. Glenn and I have been working on the techniques out in the wind and cold so that we could save the explorers’ time while they did their own packing and training, and show them how to do it once we’d worked out the best way. It is so easy to get frustrated and want to pull our gloves and mittens off and just use our fingers to do any fiddly work, but in these conditions we have to really minimise the exposure of our skin and so as much as possible has to be made doable with gloves on. This was actually a really useful task for all of the scientists to be a part of as we got to practise sampling through ice holes at these really low temperatures. 

A big part of my job involves problem solving, whether its science problems or practical problems, it’s the challenge of finding the best way to solve them that I find really exciting; although there is even more of a challenge of getting equipment working in this environment. But yesterday we had a break through: the explorers confidently collected some test water samples using the Kemmerer bottle, the various bits of equipment that we were still waiting for had been located and were on their way to us, and everything we’d tested here in Resolute seem to be working in the cold. Now we just have to play the waiting game and hope that the weather improves so that we can get the planes off the ground and actually get up to our Ice Base.

Written by Helen Findlay, Ice Base Scientist