Sir Ranulph Fiennes’ prudent withdrawal from Antarctica is available in the identical week because the successful return from the Arctic of a student at Sunderland University, which has an attractive niche in Polar research.
Matthew Ayre, who’s 25 and from Tynemouth, was engaged on ice melt, both contemporary and historical, on board the usa icebreaker Healy during a five week voyage within the Arctic Ocean.
He got the billet because Sunderland has made a speciality of the study of captains’ logs, or sea-going diaries, from whaling expeditions mounted from North Sea ports in England as much as 250 years ago. These are actually considered important to trendy studies of climate change as a result detailed observations of ice and sea conditions made by men who were seldom academics but had immense practical experience.
Doing what she does best – the Healy
Ayre’s work is a part of the university’s ARCdoc project which already has data from the various most celebrated of the ocean captains, including Sir William Parry’s expeditions in HMS Hecla to the North West Passage and the North Pole. Hecla became a famous Arctic vessel by reason of her weight and strength, originally designed for her previous role as a heavy artillery platform used to bombard Barbary Coast pirates of their main refuge at Algiers.
The archive material also includes logs sent to go looking for Sir John Franklin’s doomed try to find the North West Passage in 1847, in addition to the detailed records of many ordinary commercial whaling voyages including those run by the Palmer fleet based in Newcastle. Ayre have been focussing on 60 log books belonging to whaling vessels between 1750 and 1850, such as whalers from the north east and Yorkshire describing sea ice advancing and retreating and stipulations at the fringe of the pack ice, where they sometimes installed camp during whale hunts.
Ayre on board, along with his own log
The work involves an additional type of research, into the vocabulary utilized by the sailors including local slang for technical terms which has since been lost. Ayre has drawn on sea ice terminology from the books of the Whitby whaler William Scoresby Jnr (1789-1857) to recent satellite data. The end result would be the first ‘sea ice’ dictionary to hold both archaic and contemporary definitions of the identical thing. Ayre says:
On board the Healy I recorded what was happening with the ice, making observations every six hours using Scoresby’s ancient definitions, in parallel with the Healy’s researchers’ own daily records.
The old records describe, for instance, various varieties of ice from ‘loose’ to ‘heavy’ and using each of the data i used to be ready to map the ice edge, which hasn’t ever been done before in any great detail since it melts and freezes annually and that’s happening further and faster than ever before.
The style ahead. It was an identical for the whalers 200 years ago
ARCdoc’s director Dr Dennis Wheeler has won funding for the 3-year study from the Leverhulme Trust and is operating with the Scott Polar Research Institute, The Meteorological Office’s Hadley Research Centre and Hull University’s Maritime Studies Unit. He said:
The whaling log books are the foremost interesting of all that we use seeing that the crews weren’t trained naval officers, and that they often ventured farther north than any others. The Arctic environmentally is a hugely important area, but we have to understand how it behaved formerly so that we will be able to assess how it will behave at some point; you cannot look forward without in retrospect.
