Conducting Marine Science in the Arctic - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 220

housed a radio operator. The equipment was still there, including a radio that was so large
that a small person could have climbed through the access door. Inside were the largest
valves (tubes) I have ever seen. It still worked and the skipper sometimes coaxed it into
life because it was the only set that was guaranteed to find a radio station somewhere. The
equipment was by this time illegal, so we could never use it to send a message.
Our refuelling and crew changes in winter were all done through Greenland because it
was impossible to break through the ice to a Canadian port. It was quite an undertaking to
leave or join the ship after early November. It involved a helicopter transfer from Godthab
(nowNuuk)tothe(then)U.S.militarybaseatSondrestrom(nowKangerlussuaq).Theheli-
copters strictly operated on visual flight rules, so you faced a high probability of cancel-
lation. The SAS (Scandinavian Airlines) flights from Copenhagen came twice a week, but
Sondrestrom was itself prone to fog, leading to more cancellations. Finally, there was the
trip back to Canada.
Probably the most ambitious work we attempted at that time was to measure the pro-
ductivity of the epontic flora that lives on the bottom of sea ice in spring. This flora is the
first major source of new food for pelagic and zooplanktonic organisms in springtime. It
is therefore a very basic feature of the Arctic marine ecosystem. Measurements had been
conducted by others (such as Rita Horner and Vera Alexander) in shore-fast ice off Alaska.
They used divers who isolated an area of the flora in situ and injected carbon-14 into the
water contained in the isolated sample. They then recovered the entire sample and meas-
ured how much of the isotope had been incorporated into the epontic flora over the sample
period. The rate of epontic primary production was calculated from this rate of isotope
uptake. For safety reasons, we were prohibited from following the same procedure in our
far-offshore location of mobile pack ice. Tom Windeyer (a colleague) designed and built a
flexible cantilevered arm that we lowered through a hole drilled in the ice. It could isolate
and pluck epontic samples from the ice and then move them to the surface. In order to see
what we were doing, we used the longest veterinary fibre-optic scope we could find. Tom's
instrument was also used to deploy a light meter to measure the under-ice light regime.
On the foredeck cargo doors, another colleague, Jacquie Booth, set up an array of cells in