Lab Diaries 2: Gazing across the face of Europa

bah this is getting monthly now isn’t it…

I’m back from the field now, resigned to a less adventurous existence for the next week. Necessary given the sudden stimuli I’ve beaten my body into adjusting to through the past two weeks of roaming the frozen plains across the St. Laurent. In terms of what I got up to, I like to say it was catching up on a severely lacking Québécois childhood. It was highly experiential with a light dusting of science sprinkled across it. I licked some salty bergs, crawled into icy caverns, listened to the trickle of fleeing seawater. I felt the freeze and then got my mind over it (-20 is flip flop weather to the Inuit!). I got to play around with cameras, capturing the beauty of the space I inhabit and might be researching. I also got to tune off, zone into my field guitar, and study for my doctoral exam soon approaching this wednesday (this is major procrastination leggooo)

I danced with a Coyote! Well I thought it was a wolf, so I was ready to go to war - lupine claws against metal shovel. I glanced upon this moving dark figure in the white horizon, convinced that the awkward cold-hot pockets of air over the ice were playing some trickery on my mind. If the ice didn’t break through and consume me, frigid gaslighting might! But luckily I had my handy telephoto lens on me and spotted this playful little guy romping around. Us ecologists like to think of animals as robotic entities, running on evolutionarily derived optimized strategies for maximum energetic efficiency. Us ecologists will probably also confess in the next few sentences a dozen stories of organisms doing the strangest things for just for the hell of it. Ask my professor, Ladd, and he’ll go into a squirrel-like frenzy trying to describe how these tree rodents engage in a painfully wasteful dance of trust before snatching a singular nut from his outstretched fingers. In this case, the moment the wolf saw me he launched into a wonderfully dynamic suryanamaskar, goading me by demonstrating a flawless downward dog that he sprung into goofy variations. Everytime he froze in place, I took it as a sign to unleash some of my own moves. 30 minutes of this later, we both got bored and parted ways. Got a glorious bunch of shots of the dancing fella. Local vested interests carefully identified him to be coyote (a fox was thrown in there as well). I have yet to dance with the wolves…

Another fun endeavour I embarked on was looking at how the ice moved with the wind. Sea ice is a betwixing mistress, formed carelessly and violently in a frigidly turbulent process. In most cases, she begins as a slush of seawater (known as frazil ice) visibly confused between alliances to her solid or freeflowing brethren. Then a decision is made and little hand-sized circular pancakes (known as pancake ice) form, adorably rounded by clumsy collisions with neighbouring ice-lands. A lot of these pancakes freeze in-place in the form of a GIANT pancake (known as an ice floe), roaming till heat eats away at them. Floes collide in a spectacularly tectonic fashion. Ice that freezes directly onto the shoreline or any exposed rock (known as landfast ice) can also be ravaged by these reckless floes that sometimes might even collide and then freeze in place, extending the icy coastline from a couple feet to a couple hundred kilometers! Polar floes are incredulously MASSIVE. But because these floes are free-moving, they are at the mercy of the wind and the sea currents. Being on the southern coast of the St. Laurent, wind coming from the north stack these floes onto our coast fooling my naïve, tropical mind into thinking I’m gazing across an icy tundra. The moment the wind dies or ventures eastward, all the floes vanish into the Atlantic; leaving me with just a couple hundred feet of ice to play around on. The wind, current and tides operate on a far more laid back clock than this genZ instant-gratification monkey, so I let a GoPro mounted at height work the heavy machinery for me as I explored other things!

It definitely revealed some fascinating things about how the winds worked. However the coolest thing that it revealed was what brutality a winter storm could inflict on the ice sheet. The landfast ice I mentioned above is generally a solid flat sheet of ice that bluntly traces the undulations of the rocky surface beneath, cracking every so often when it gives up on trying to be flexibile. This storm did something really interesting to landfast ice - it trebuchéd seawater onto the landfast ice, identifying fissures and cracking into them with cold impunity. This happened due to a particular set of conditions being met first. Heavy winds across ice doesn’t make waves. So, first the storm direction had to rapidly move all the ice out of the way before it reared its attention southward. Heavy winds drove waves onto the ice, melting a previously intact surface 1.5 m thick into a Bauhaus field of geometric peculiarities. Walking across the ice, I realised this just by tasting the salty snow along the top of the fringes of the icesheet. A salty puddle on top of the ice means that violent sea water was launched there.

As much as it horrifically sliced a marzipan frosted cake into shocking slices I’d never share at the high-society events I often host, it did give me a unique opportunity to venture under the ice (sous les glaces!) and for the tiniest few moments live the Kangiqsuujuammiut (Inuit of Kangiqsuujuaq) experience as they venture below the ice for their unique winter harvesting of blue mussels (that I’ll hope to see one day). I tried to tap into all the videos I’ve seen and interviews I’ve read about this practice. It’s a very physical and sensoral experience. Under the ice, life is warm - -60C outside would be a balmy -2C under the ice (water can’t get colder than that!). There’s an alluring trickle playing on your ears as fluid stragglers from the descending tide panic down to their fleeing mother. The only thing missing was the uncomfortable darkness of the sea-ice cavern, cautiously listening to the ominous groan of the ice ceiling creaking around. Also where were the sweet and delicious mussels I was promised under the ice! So peculiar that the mussels I saw at Métis were all empty, gaping open with snow inside the hollow shells. A Nature paper somewhere there?…

…probably not. Still pretty cool.

A cool highlight was that I got to tap into camera vision during my excursions. I’ve been moderately obsessed with this concept developed by early-soviet photographers back when the Russian engine was more about the people and less about tyrranical excuses to wave rusty nukes around. Photographers like Alexander Rodchenko were compelled to believe that the camera, when used right, yielded a perspective superior to our measly eyes. We navigate the world boringly just under 2 m, but a camera placed at an opportune location like on top of a water tower looking downward or into a car mirror back at the driver makes us reconsider the world we roam. Sure these seem like common elements to our mainstream media which is built on the influencing community offering unique perspectives on life using their camera - but this all had its roots back then. Back then when a selfie from height required you to be physically strong enough to lug this magical photobox up a ladder and know your equipment well enough to snap a picture that you know would be developed to perfection in a week’s time. Some of these photographs are jawdropping and would have been even more revolutionary at the time of release simply because it forces you to focus on what the photographer is offering you in their little rectangular window. The act of taking the photograph in itself is such a wonderful didactic tool because it forced me to not worry about the grandeur of EVERYTHING around me and just concentrate purely on what was going on in my frame. Why did the ice slip off the rock in this particular way? How did the wind scheme to sculpt this snowdrift? How did ice form around a particular piece of algae such that when it was uplifted, stalagmites of Ascophyllum were left gazing upward at its lobotomized stalagtite counterpart.

I’m definitely not the first one to use camera vision for science! The Goldbogen lab uses a mix of GoPros and drones to analyze migrating whale behaviour. I worked on a project with Amy Henry that used timelapses to study how sea urchins scurry around socially. Cameras are such an amazing tool for science because it gives us full control over space and time; we scientists love full control. I may not necessarily agree too much on the soviet approach with photography as solely for the mechanical purpose of furthering their national objectives and rejecting the emotional aspects of what was in the frames. Interestingly, modern day science photography leans deep into this philosophical apprach to photography. The number of times I’ve tried to get my coral scientist buddy Zoe Dellaert to lend her unbelievably trippalicious coral photographs to a musician starving for some high quality cover art, exhausts me. Even some of the CLASI-FISH imaging of microbial communities by the Mark-Welch Lab at the MBL is staggeringly gorgeous. Look at this and tell me this doesn’t make you feel something for a microbial community that could be living in your mouth as we speak! Luckily the last few weeks, I got to reside in the emotional bubble of, ‘LOOK HOW PRETTY THAT WEIRD ICE BLOCK IS’ - the future holds a more objective lens for me ;)