13 July, 2001

Preparing for VIPs Friday the 13th, July 01 God tur! (Good luck!)

Life on Board Today we prepared the ship for tomorrow's visitors. We will have 3 Swedish VIPs onboard as well as a camera crew. The guests, who will spend one night onboard, are important people from various scientific organizations in Sweden. The camera crew came to document the expedition. Also arriving by SuperPuma helicopter from Svalbard are some new scientists who will be with us for the rest of the expedition. Then tomorrow, the guests will leave and the helicopter will make one more trip to bring the rest of the new scientists onboard. Our own little helicopter will go sit on land somewhere on Svalbard while the rotation is taking place since we only have one helicopter pad on the Oden (As a result of all of this, I need to move out of my room for one night then back in - a little hectic).

Where Are We Now? We are sitting to the northwest of the Svalbard Archipelago and you can see the entire coastline to the southwest. It is beautiful and rugged, with several glaciers visible. We are on the archipelago's shelf so the water here is too shallow to be of interest to most of the scientists. We have had to move in closer to the shoreline to get in helicopter range. We are actually in the Greenland Sea and there is a warm offshoot of the Gulf Stream called the West Spitzbergen Current that keeps the area ice free at this time of year. The water is a balmy 3 degrees C!

Scientists at Work Not much science going on today due to the rotation, just finishing up with our last station and processing data.

Vi ses! (See you later!)

From Deck 4 on the Icebreaker Oden, somewhere north of Spitzbergen, Dena Rosenberger