She loves Thanksgiving and will try to grab some holiday food. But Jennifer MacKinnon will be lucky to keep her feet today as the UC San Diego oceanographer toils in a most unforgiving place.
It’s white-knuckle time in the Arctic Ocean.
MacKinnon is leading a team of scientists who’ll spend the holiday riding out a beastly storm that’s forecast to produce 70 mph winds and 20-foot waves. It also will be snowing — or “blizzard-ing,” as MacKinnon calls it. And this is the time of year when the sun doesn’t rise above the horizon. It only produces a brief, soft glow.
The researchers will seek shelter near Jan Mayen, a desolate Norwegian island whose 7,470-foot volcano will help blunt the winds.
“The captain feels confident that the ship will be fine,” MacKinnon told the San Diego Union-Tribune during a cellphone call from the Kronprins Haakon, a 328-foot Norwegian icebreaker. “But Thanksgiving might be a little bit crazy.”
MacKinnon’s science team is seeking shelter from a fearsome storm Thursday in the bays of Jan Mayen, a volcanic island.
(Kerstin Bergentz)
She thinks of this as the perfect moment to count her blessings.
“I feel gratitude for being able to be an explorer and to do science that I find important,” said the 50-year-old MacKinnon, whose work also has taken her to the broad reaches of the Bay of Bengal and balmy Palau.
“How did I get so lucky to be here?”
She is a faculty member at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which has been home to two researchers who shared a Nobel Prize for climate change research and others who greatly contributed to a second Nobel in the same field. Scripps also was home to the late Roger Revelle, who helped prove, against much opposition, that the greenhouse effect is real.
MacKinnon collects ocean readings that are essential to improving climate change models — things as basic as the temperature and salinity of the ocean and how its currents move. In 2021, she published a widely-cited paper on so-called Arctic heat bombs, plumes of warm water that flow beneath ice, helping melt ice sheets.
UCSD’s Jennifer MacKinnon has been on roughly 20 major science expeditions to areas as different as the Arctic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and Palau.
(Kerstin Bergentz)
With backing from the Office of Naval Research, she’s now leading a 30-person team that’s using water sampling devices and remotely-operated underwater gliders to study Arctic waters.
The expedition began on Nov. 6 and will end next week, when she returns to Oslo, Norway, where her husband and two children are living temporarily. MacKinnon is on a sabbatical, which is meant to be a period of rest and reflection. But she digs math and physics and took a break from Southern California.
“I appreciate the novelty of the weather out here, because there is no weather in San Diego,” said MacKinnon. “Here, it’s like, ‘Oh, snow. And cold. This is amazing. For years, I didn’t have to wear sweaters or make soup.’”
She also has to cope with the seasonally dark skies above the Arctic Ocean.
The darkness has allowed her to see the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights, shimmer in a dreamy way.
But it can also be exhausting and unnerving, as she has learned this week.
On Tuesday night came the first pitching waves from the approaching storm, breaking at 12 feet and expected to nearly double byThanksgiving. The temperature today will barely reach 17 degrees. It’ll feel colder due to the winds.
This whole experience “is disorienting because you don’t know what time of day it is,” she said. “It leads to a sense of being disconnected. We have meals and try to pretend that it is, like, breakfast time, even if it is dark.”
The team has access to fast internet service via Starlink satellites. They can read the news online. And MacKinnon is usually a news hound. But her round-the-clock schedule has left less time for that.
The outside world has been fading away.
Amid pinkish-purple skies, Jennifer MacKinnon enjoys a quiet moment before darkness falls and a rollicking storm arrives.
(Kerstin Bergentz)
“We have our little ship, with our little bubble, and can see to the horizon,” said MacKinnon, who has been on roughly 20 major expeditions. “But that’s it.”
She has never missed her children’s birthdays to go on field research, or missed a family Christmas. But she’s been away from home on many of her own birthdays — including the big 5-0 — and some Thanksgivings.
That comes at an emotional cost.
For decades, MacKinnon has traveled to the Bay area, where she grew up, for Thanksgiving. The trip includes a big get-together the Saturday after the holiday with childhood friends. That won’t happen this year.
She looks for balance in life.
“I’m in the middle stages of my career, teaching classes and raising my kids. There’s always a ton of things going on,” she said.
“But I also like coming out here, where there is a simplicity and purity to the isolation. It’s just these people and this project. We’re studying the ocean — the very thing that rocks us to sleep on the ship.”
