Arctic Ed's Travelog

August 28 5PM

The Cabot Strait separates Newfoundland from Cape Breton Island, which is part of Nova Scotia. Reputed to have wild and difficult weather, today it is calm sunny, and warm. The air temperature is 20 C, the water 18 C. Having circumnavigated Newfoundland, we are about to close the loop.

At this moment we can see Newfoundland behind us and Cape Breton ahead! The ocean is glassy and smooth. Darin spotted a leatherback turtle, which was exciting for me because I've seen them at their egg-laying beach (Tortuguera) on the Atlantic shore of Costa Rica. Talk about pelagic! Best of all, we now know of one animal that eats jellyfish.

Yesterday we left Woody Harbor and Bonne Bay after lunch. What a beautiful place! We hiked up to the Visitors Center of Gros Morne National Park and tried to absorb a wealth of information in the form of recordings, dioramas, diagrams, and rock samples. The big story is plate tectonics, the record of which is laid bare in the landscape here. No wonder geologists go wild. Everything they've read about plate collisions has been assembled and displayed like a textbook, one that took 600 million years to write. Crowning it all is a red-ochre "Tablelands", devoid of vegetation, a huge chunk of peridotite straight from the mantle, obducted above the North American Plate when the pre-Atlantic ocean closed up. How all the pieces got where they are today is utterly confusing. I wanted them to make a 3-D computer model of the motion of all the rocks so that I could play it again and again and watch the layers shift and slide and squish and wear down and form rocks anew.

Last night was clear. The new moon made a brief appearance and then followed the sun below the horizon, giving us about 9 hours of darkness. Bummer. But the stars were brilliant, the wake glittered with bioluminescence, and the northern horizon glowed gently with a broad auroral band. Nothing fancy, no shooting rays or wavy pulsations, just a delicate region of light that we've seen on every clear night for the last ten days. I guess Northern Lights need to be more energetic to be seen farther south.

It seems that 2007-08 is International Polar Year, an event that happens roughly every 50 years. The first one, in 1872-73, was apparently one of the first instances where scientists from several (14) countries managed to cooperate and share data instead of competing and attacking each others' theories and observations, which had been standard practice for arctic exploration. Check out the website. I don't know what events are being planned, but it seems fortuitous, doesn't it? Shall we all make reservations on an ice-breaker?