Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Davis Strait 19 Oct 2011

I want to take this space to congratulate Theodore and the Carleton Place Canadians on being ranked 14th this week in Canada in Jr A hockey. Not bad for a team only three years in exisitence.

We are working our way across the Labrador Sea towards Greenland.  It take about 2 hours to steam from station to station. The time to do a cast varies. If the water depth is only 200 m we can be done quickly: 15 or 20 minutes.  If the water depth is 2000 m it takes longer.  The descent rate for the CTD is 1 m/s. So it takes 2000 seconds or about 30 minutes to go down. It then takes 45 minutes or so to come back up because you stop and take water samples.  The rosette has 24 water bottles on it that you can close on command. Once on deck you then transfer the water from the rosette bottles to small sample bottles for chemical analysis. The key to successful oceanography is keeping track of where the water came from in each little sample bottlle - not trival when you have several thousand samples.


Now a few words about Keefers.
After the railway pulled its people out of Keefers and moved them to the metropolis of North Bend, there was not much left: Hannah Brothers orchard and the Hannah general store / post office.  The train only stopped if you flagged it down. The customers for the store and post office were largely single men living in the hills. Some were prospectors making their living panning for gold in the creeks and the Fraser River (picture below). 

Some were remittance men, living in Canada supported by their family in England. In Victorian culture this often meant a black sheep of the family who was paid to stay away from England.   I expect that their sins were of a fairly mild nature by modern standards.

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