Russian Arctic
According to the Oxford American Dictionary an expedition is a journey or voyage undertaken by a group of people with a particular purpose, and our voyage on National Geographic Explorer has been a true expedition in so many ways. Our purpose: to be the first foreign flagged ship to explore the White Sea and Frans Josef Land; to spend an epic six days in the Archipelago of Frans Josef Land fully taking advantage of the rich natural and historical environment.
Being allowed to bring our own vessel into Russian Waters has allowed us to have all of our Expedition Tools at our fingertips. The Undersea Department, the most reliant upon these devices, as had many adventures this voyage. Literally exploring where no one has been before, we, the NGEX dive/ROV team (Baker Oscar, Cold Cook Tanya, Chief Electrician Dino and myself) used the ROV, Splash Camera, and HD camera in the Underwater Housing to bring back images of the benthic communities found throughout our voyage.
The ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) allows us to go deeper and longer than we would be able to while diving. In Frans Josef Land, the ROV flew down to 540 feet for one hour. It is with this fantastic machinery we are able to see the true interactions between deep water benthic creatures. Normally deep water exploration is done by dredging – taking a swath of the bottom up in a net or other capturing device, mixing and smashing the creatures. With the ROV we not only gain more information about what is living at such great depths, but also how each creature moves and interacts. We watched thousands of brittle stars of different shapes and sizes skitter across the bottom, and saw species of isopods and shrimp we had never seen before.
While diving this trip, the water temperatures ranged between 55F and 30F, the former feeling like the tropics to us regular polar divers. In northern Norway and the entrance to the White Sea we found King Crab. First introduced outside Murmansk in the 1960’s, they have rapidly been expanding their territory, now found south of Tromso, Norway. As the crabs move, they eat everything in their path, destroying the bottom, and have become the bane of the fishing industry’s existence, as the fish have to move further and further away to find their natural food.
The bird cliffs we dove under offered sheer walls with thousands and thousands of anemones, soft corals, and sponges, all filter feeding on the rich organic material that cascades down from the cliffs above.
Our expedition is now drawing to a close, but our lives have been enriched by the sights, sounds, and even smells we have experienced on our expedition to he Russian High Arctic.
