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John Kemp and Ulf Hedman walking on ice.

John Kemp and Ulf Hedman walking on ice.
John Kemp and Ulf Hedman walking on ice.
John Kemp and Ulf Hedman walking on ice.
John Kemp and Ulf Hedman walking on ice.
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75289
Linder, Christopher
John Kemp and Ulf Hedman walking on ice.
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09/11/2007
graphics/agave2/cl_20070722_agave07_jaguar_173.jpg
Caption from Oceanus magazine, Vol. 46, No. 2, Pg. 26:
Two days later, Puma’s robotic sibling, Jaguar, surfaced somewhere under a seemingly endless blanket of white. Oden’s helicopter flew low, dangling a receiver just above the ice to listen for a sound signal from Jaguar. After more than an hour, a signal finally came. Pilot Sven Stenvall dropped a red-painted piece of wood on the ice to mark Jaguar’s location underneath. Oden broke ice and up popped Jaguar. Mattias Peterson, Oden’s captain, expertly and gingerly maneuvered the icebreaker toward it, trying to avoid accidentally running over it, pushing damaging ice floes into it, or stirring up the ice too much and losing the vehicle again. WHOI engineer John Kemp (shown here in red jacket) and Ulf Hedman, expedition leader from the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat, were lowered in a metal basket to the ice to recover Jaguar. Each man was armed: Hedman with a shotgun in case of polar bear; Kemp with a pole and a rope and safety harness so he could jump safely from one ice floe to another. But by the time they reached the ice, Jaguar had suddenly disappeared again, and they could not relocate it. More fretful hours passed, but at last, a crack opened in a large ice floe that had pinned Jaguar. Stenvall landed on the floe, and copilot Geir Akse hooked a line to Jaguar. Oceanographers often say their underwater vehicles “fly” through the ocean above the seafloor. Jaguar flew through the air. The helicopter delivered it to a pool of open water near Oden, where it was brought aboard as ice floes rushed in against the hull. During the expedition, Puma and Jaguar were launched eight times. To Reves-Sohn’s and Singh’s relief and delight, the number of recoveries equaled the number of deployments.
Photo by Chris Linder
© Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
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