CENTENNIAL, Colo. — When Sequim High School alumnus Adam Jenkins says he recently took a summer cruise, it’s not so easy to get your mind around what happened on it.
Jenkins, who grew up sailing the Strait of Juan de Fuca, is the project manager for a giant expedition called LARISSA — or Larsen Ice Shelf System Antarctica.
The first phase finished earlier this month, after Jenkins and 30 scientists from around the world spent two months around the South Pole on their research ship, the 308-foot Nathaniel B. Palmer.
Jenkins, who grew up sailing the Strait of Juan de Fuca, is the project manager for a giant expedition called LARISSA — or Larsen Ice Shelf System Antarctica.
The first phase finished earlier this month, after Jenkins and 30 scientists from around the world spent two months around the South Pole on their research ship, the 308-foot Nathaniel B. Palmer.
As LARISSA’s manager, Jenkins is in charge of the Palmer and all of the research equipment used to study the effects of global climate change on Antarctica.
The ship departed in early January for the Antarctic Peninsula and the Larsen Ice Shelf, in 2002 the site of a massive collapse later shown in the Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”
During their stay at the bottom of the world, the LARISSA team, led by geosciences professor Eugene Domack of Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., used helicopters to retrieve ice core samples, generated swath maps of the sea floor, installed weather stations and glacier cameras and sent an undersea robot named Suzee down to shoot video of what lives at the bottom of the South Polar Ocean.
They also did copious sampling: from the ice shelf, the seas and the sediment cores.
LARISSA, a $10 million project funded by the National Science Foundation, is the most complex Antarctic mission in the foundation’s history.
To Jenkins, 43, it’s high adventure.
He fell in love with the water as a boy on his parents Gail and David Jenkins’ 27-foot sailboat, and learned his way around the North Olympic Peninsula before moving to Seattle, where he lived aboard his own sloop while attending the University of Washington.
Jenkins didn’t finish college; one evening during his senior year he called home and said, “Dad, I’m going sailing,” and went off to Mexico, Panama, the San Blas Archipelago of the Caribbean and Guatemala’s Rio Dulce.
He then started a business, Yacht Logic, and delivered boats to ports all over North America.
“He was game for moving anything that floated,” David Jenkins recalled.
About 12 years ago, with help from people he’d met sailing, Jenkins got on board a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel and worked his way up, his father said, from volunteer biology assistant and deckhand to cruise director for NOAA’s Antarctic Marine Living Resources Program.
After 10 years with NOAA, Jenkins took the post of project manager with Raytheon Polar Services, the contractor for LARISSA.
The job, he said, is akin to being the architect of a skyscraper.
“I manage the entire project from start to end: All of the logistics, working with the scientists to develop their cruise plan, every contract, the helicopters, the shipping of the equipment, working with the vessel staff.
“I’m the liaison between our ship staff and the grantees. I wrote the budget,” Jenkins said in an interview from his office at Raytheon Polar Services’ headquarters in Centennial, Colo.
Supporting the team of scientists starts with the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a ship with rare ice-breaking and research capabilities.
“The Palmer can conduct a huge amount of science over the side,” Jenkins said.
“Maybe five ships in the world have what it has,” in terms of moving through ice and slowing down enough for oceanographic sampling.
As for the scientists themselves — from 11 U.S. states and four nations — they’re very good at conceptualizing their research, but often they can use help with organization, Jenkins said.
He and the support crew put the equipment into the water and lift out the samples.
“It’s a real team effort . . . The scientists rely on us. We keep them out of trouble a lot.”
Jenkins first traveled to Antarctica in 1990 on a NOAA ship, and has been back down nearly every year since.
And yes, he has seen transformation: retreating glaciers, the Larsen ice shelf that has fallen apart to an extent unprecedented in the past 10,000 years.
The LARISSA team is also studying the Antarctic food web, which is changing along with the environment.
Penguins, for example, are no longer surviving on their traditional prey, Jenkins said.
The scientists are seeking to understand connections between such changes and the abrupt collapse of the ice, and how the changes will affect the rest of the planet’s life.
The weather near the South Pole, he added, “was not that cold.”
Temperatures hovered around freezing most of the time.
“It was probably colder in Buffalo, New York,” and “we actually had rain, which is very uncommon.”
A number of LARISSA scientists and support crew maintained Web sites and blogs that are still available, Jenkins noted.
Hamilton College’s sites are http://tinyurl.com/y9mr9sr and http://tinyurl.com/y8opdnt, while a Columbia University researcher, Debra Tillinger, has “Ms. T at Sea,” an entertaining blog geared toward young people, at http://mstsea.blogspot.com.
Jenkins returned to his home in Parker, Colo., on March 7 and had a couple of days off before going back to work in his office.
He’s planning a weeklong sailing trip with his 4-year-old daughter, Sophia, and a visit soon with his parents — who since his childhood have moved from Sequim to Port Townsend.
“I consider Port Townsend my hometown,” he said, adding that he thinks about moving back there in a few years.
He has another LARISSA cruise to manage, though.
A second two-month voyage is set for January and February 2012, so the team can finish the research it didn’t get to this year.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
