Close encounters of the iceberg kind.

 

 

 

 

Saturday morning looking outside my bedroom window the temperature had dropped, this was the reason why.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a few tense moments at the site this week as we had a visit from an iceberg that has been lurking in the waters of Strathcona Sound for about a month now. I was so far away when I arrived that it looked only like a speck on the distant shore. It started to move about 3 days before it arrived on our shores.  Because there is little in terms of objects that give some perspective to distances it was upon us with frightening speed.

 

This is a section of the wharf under repair and the most vulnerable which received the most damage.

 

 

This is the section which received the brunt of the force and it is the section that is mostly complete and therefore did not sustain any damage. The piece of ice you see was the iceberg giving up part of it's size to the collision. As the iceberg moved on it's way it started to lose some other pieces presumably as a result of the collision with the wharf.

This what the iceberg looked like from a distance with some objects around to give a better idea of the size.  This iceberg is not large by any stretch and is actually on the smaller size of what is possible to encounter.  A few years ago a couple of my coworkers were up here doing a Geotechnical investigation in support of designing this project.  It involved drilling a borehole from a barge some 75 feet offshore of the wharf. Because it can get very cold when it is windy they had built a temporary wall to shield them from the wind which also blocked their view of a seemingly stationary iceberg. Once these icebergs break loose of being grounded they can gain speed very quickly if conditions are right.  Long story short they had to jump into the small boat they were using to get on and off the barge abandoning the drill rig and barge.  The iceberg did miss the barge but grabbed one of the four anchors holding it in place and dragged it almost a kilometer before breaking the line.

 

 

Here is the iceberg dying a safe distance away grounded. The ship in the distance is sending in barges full of supplies this is called a sealift. 

Back in North Baffin Island and it is getting colder.

This part of Canada is labeled  "a Polar Desert" and it really is a desert.  There is little vegetation and almost no rain.  The sun shines all the time and even though it is cooling off,  the constant sun really does pick up your spirits. The days are getting shorter fast.  Instead of the 24 hours of sunshine a day we were getting a month ago the sun disappears at 11 pm now until 530 am.  Although it does not truly get dark it is close enough to being dark that sleep comes easier.

We had 4 Narwhal pass within 20 feet of the divers working on the wharf yesterday. By the time I ran for my movie camera and got back they were gone. Two adults and 2 babies visited the site . I saw them coming from some distance and I ran for my movie camera, in case I needed to get a shot from a distance.  While I was gone they came right up beside the site and left. They also left me without any pictures.

While we are on the subject of narwhals, when we went to the meal hall the other night for supper there was a plate of Narwhal Muktuk on every table for our dining pleasure.  At the galley there was raw narwhal on ice, sushi-like Narwhal it looks the same as cooked except the yellowish layer is pink. The cooked is more tender or less tough I guess.  I did not partake myself but it was comical to watch the face of participants and the ejecting of narwhal pieces into the refuse containers.  A few people liked it or said they did anyway.

 

 

My wife liked the anniversary present Narwhal earrings I bought the last time I was here, a lot,  and I won an other pair in a raffle for medical expenses for the artist. So, Narwhal is a huge part of the culture here as was exhibited by the reaction to the Narwhal visit by the local people working on site.