I’m on top of the world, Yay!
The day we all were expecting finally came, the farthest distance in our journey was finally reached, we were at the North Pole. As the ship was approaching the last stretch to 90 degrees north, the STARC team, my advisor, and I stood in front of the monitors with the meteorological display that shows the GPS in real-time. 89 59.95, 89 59.97, then all values disappeared and there was a red line in the space the numbers were supposed to be showing, we were at latitude 90 North. We all jumped for joy. I ran down to get my mustang suit, the special suit provided by the Coast Guard to protect from hypothermia, and my boots and walked outside to breathe the air on top of the world.
The speakers gave us the official message:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the Captain. We are at North Pole”
Everyone got outside to jump and take pictures together; multiple portraits of happy faces were taken. My friends and I danced to the Imagine Dragons song, On top of the world as we hugged each other. All white in our surroundings, and the few rays of sunshine that barely reached the pole illuminated with pretty colors the sky. We had made it, now back to the reason we were here, to do science.
The CTD was waiting for us to be deployed, stuffed with around a hundred Styrofoam cups decorated by each person on the ship. The bottom depth is 4300 meters, the deepest cast so far in the cruise. The pressure at this depth had shrunk the cups into tiny little cups, a perfect memoir for the North Pole station. We had become one of the few people in the world to reach this part of the planet. We had the privilege to get water samples from different depths on this point, as well as mud samples. How lucky we are to experience this opportunity; how lucky are we to be able to study this environment? As we danced and sang, we took those precious water samples, excited to run them the next day before ice liberty.
Ice liberty was the event in which everyone on the ship get to go walk in the ice at the North Pole. The ice experts made sure the thickness was safe and they determined a perimeter in which we could hang out for 2 hours in the snow. We all got dressed up in our mustang suits, multiple layers of clothes below the suit, scarves, face coverings, beanies, and gloves. We made a line and walked down to the ice. When my feet touched the ground, I started running around, this was not land, we were walking on a frozen ocean, below us, a deep basin. Running around felt liberating. The Healy crew had prepared a pole to bury in the snow, a person dressed up as Santa Claus and lady Claus, my friend had a polar bear beanie, and we encountered the first species of penguin ever seen in the North Pole, my advisor made the joke of dressing up as a penguin. We were all like little kids in the snow playing and running and laughing and hugging. After the ice liberty, it was time for us to gather on the flight deck for Coast Guards ceremonies, where people got ranked up from their positions. Then came the group picture, a hundred persons lined up in front of the Healy, smiling for the camera that would immortalize that moment.
The rest of the day we spent talking, watching movies, and relaxing. The next day we did pumps and multicores to get those north pole samples we were all eager to have. After another day of science, we started steaming back south. We had crossed the international date line, heading to our next station in longitude east. Now we were in the eastern hemisphere!
These pictures were taken during the NSF-funded U.S. Synoptic Arctic Survey (SAS) expedition Healy 2202.