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arcticfloatboat

Utqiagvik Landfast Sea Ice Break Out

Updated: Jul 12

June 28, 2024


Each year, the Float Your Boat Program closely monitors the seasonal landfast ice in the Arctic. The landfast sea ice on which we deployed wooden boats near Utqiagvik, Alaska on April 6, 2024 (Fig. 1) began its annual breakup in the afternoon of April 26, 2024, drifting out to sea later that day (Fig. 2). View NASA Worldview satellite imagery of the seasonal event.


Our friends Brower Frantz and Bradley Bodfish were hunting on the open water near town and stumbled on an area where many of the boats washed off the sea ice and were adrift in the open water (Figs. 3 and 4). Brower is part of the North Slope Borough Search and Rescue team that helps us deploy weather buoys on the drifting sea ice north of town, but we have known him since 2012 during his days at UMIAQ, which is now UIC Science. These boats were decorated by students at Hopson Middle School in Utqiagvik and Creekside High School in Florida.


Peyton Nageak also found a boat in the same area as Browers that was decorated at Desert Ridge Middle School in Albuquerque, New Mexico (Fig. 5).


Figure 6 (below) shows how the buoys that we deployed around the wooden boat site have dispersed over the ocean from their original arrangement approximately 10 yards apart on the landfast ice to over 20 miles apart in just a few hours having been dispersed by the winds, ocean currents and eddies.


Where will all the buoys and boats end up? Be sure to monitor floatboat.org to track the boats you or your friends and family have decorated!


Figure 1. We drew a “whale tail” on the sea ice NE of Utqiagvik, Alaska, near the old Naval Arctic Research Laboratory (NARL) using the wooden boats decorated by students from many schools listed here. This deployment was led by Keegan Heron, PolarSTEAM Fellow, and Cassandra Lam (PSC/APL/UW).


Figure 2. Animation of the sea ice radar images around the time landfast sea ice broke loose from the land and sea floor. The landfast sea ice on which the boats were deployed broke off around 14:00 (Alaska Time) on June 26, 2024. Sea ice shown in blue has moved in the last twelve hours, yellow colored ice in the last 3 hours, and red during the last 30 minutes. Animation courtesy of the Barrow Sea ice Radar team (Lead Scientist: Andy Mahoney, UAF https://seaice.alaska.edu/gi/observatories/barrow_radar/).


Figure 3. Video of Brower and Bradley Bodfish finding some of the FYB wooden boats drifting on the open water NE of Utqiagvik.


Figure 4. Brower Frantz and Bradley Bodfish found one of the trackers that the USIABP team deployed around the FYB site and picked up a couple of the boats. The first boat (top right and bottom left #241959) was decorated by Ana in Mr. Frix’ 8th Grade Class at Hopson Middle School, Utqiagvik, Alaska. The blue boat in bottom right was decorated at Creekside Hight School, Florida, USA.


Float Your Boat boat from Desert Ridge Middle School, Albuquerque

Figure 5. A third boat (242154)  was recovered by Peyton Nageak, and was decorated at Desert Ridge Middle School, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA


Float Your Boat boats and IABP buoy track map off Point Barrow

Figure 6. This map shows how the two buoys pictured in Figure 1 and other buoys nearby have drifted in the hours after break up.

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