Journal Entry #1,
Dinner menu (shipboard, 11/22): Shish-kabob, salad, French fries, mashed
potato and vegetables, with spice cake for dessert.
24 hours of flight travel to our destination:
One major part of the readiness routine is the warehouse issuing
of clothing for the Antarctic environment. We were each given a duffel
bag of clothes including jackets, bib overalls, rain/foul weather gear, socks,
gloves, sunglasses, flannel shirts, sunglasses and even long underwear!
We had to try everything on before leaving as it’s terrible once at sea to find
your glacier jacket has a broken zipper!
It’s not all work and no play, however! After a morning of
unpacking and setting up the labs, labeling all drawers and cabinets, and
stowing the shipping boxes, we caught a private tour bus to the Otway Penguin
Sanctuary, about 70 kilometers away. We walked through the nesting
grounds of a colony of Magellanic Penguins, on a roped boardwalk. The
penguins went about their business, occasionally ducking behind sandy beach
grass mounds or going to their nests which are underground!
This is a burrowing breed, and nests were as much as 200 yards from the beach,
despite the long, waddley walk to get food and socialize with their neighbors
at the ocean’s edge. We were able to stand behind a wooden blind and
watch the birds gathering on the beach and diving into the cold, briny
surf.
The days are long down here (sun sets at about
Our final destination on Sunday was a sheep and cattle ranch
called ‘Estancia Rio Verde’, also on
The setup of labs continued on Monday, with a PI (principal
investigator) meeting,
equipment shopping, and room assignments posting. We
all unpacked, tried our email (important!), and saw some semblance of the
coming routines. Preparation for sea travel included thick wood cutout
stands/braces for microscopes being screwed into the lab table tops, boxes
being tied down and loose ‘missiles’ stowed. This was the last day of
“liberty”, and most of us went off the ship for dinners of local seafood (large
loads of king crab on the dock every day!) before returning for our first night
in our shipboard bunks.
Day of Departure was lots of work mixed in with some
hurry-up-and-wait. The actual time we left the dock was delayed two hours
from the original plan, but that’s a story for tomorrow….
Journal
Entry #2,
Our “
Shortly into our travels, “muster” was called to hold a Sea Safety
Review. We brought our life jackets and Survival Suits from our bunk
rooms to the main lounge, and proceeded to try them on. We were all
challenged to pull on these all-in-one rubber-cuffed and boots-built-in giant
orange Gumby suits! It gave a whole new meaning to “one size fits all” as
we looked quite ridiculous, but we all knew that these suits could make the
difference between life and death should an accident occur that required
wearing them. We were also oriented to the location and use of
lifeboats. These looked more like “pods” with their egg-shaped
construction, and an entryway that was just a small watertight hatch.
A marine pilot must navigate ships in and out of port, and one
actually drove the ship to a point near the end of the Straits of Magellan
before turning it over to the LMG Captain. Around
0630
Lat/Long: N053degrees 07.845 W067degrees 23.607
Air temp: 7.8degrees C/Water temp: 6degrees C/Water depth: 77 meters
Wind speed: 30-35mph (with gusts to 50 at about
Albatross glide over the boiling sea with the grace and ease of a
glider plane, depending almost wholly on the wind’s play off the waves.
Their tapered wings, sometimes measuring 10 feet tip to tip, barely move, and I
haven’t yet seen one resting on the water.
1st plankton tow
of the cruise was taken around
The 2nd tow, this
time to scrape the ocean bottom (benthic), occurred around
The tow schedule is what is driving the cruise at present, but
there will be time to allow the salp (a type of jellyfish) group to do
some SCUBA dive sampling along the way, weather permitting. It is hoped
that the first of these will be tonight (not in the dark - it stays light until
Journal
Entry #3, November 25, 2004 Thanksgiving Day
Lat/Long: S054degrees 04.977 W065degrees 45.154 at Midnight
The Station #3 tow had gone out at S53 degrees 24.41 W066degrees 57.621,
at about 8k ship speed and wind at 22-25ph. Air temp is 7.5degrees C.
This was a benthic sled trawl, which brought up what looked like
just sand and small (1lb) rocks, but turned out to yield many samples, large
and small. We were able to stand out on the deck at
I turned in around 5am, and could already smell the special meal
ahead already being prepared…
The noon meal was a Thanksgiving Feast with turkey and ham, and all the
fixin’s. There were even traditional pecan and mincemeat pies for
dessert. I believe the spirit of the day was truly there, with everyone
(from
I made a stop at the Bridge today (story for another day).
It's gorgeous from up there! The people at that station really know the
birds: giant petrels, cape petrels and black browed albatross were doing lazy
circles around the ship.
Today, Dive Operations were put into play at last (Station #6;
Stations# 4 and #5 were plankton and bottom, respectively, with good results),
and the gelatinous zooplankton team (jelly hunters) suited up and rode the wild
Zodiac to their first Antarctic dive (well, almost Antarctic). One
of today’s divers, Sandy Williams of WHOI, wrote of the experience with great
enthusiasm:
“The Zodiac dive boat was launched with Jamie, our female MT
[marine technician] to start the engine and tend lines and then Brennan, one of
the divers, climbed down the ladder to get the rest of us aboard. Brennan was
the tender, a diver so he knew the drill but not in a suit and staying on the
surface. Jeff, our safety diver, Larry, our PI scientist, Erich, experienced
Antarctic diver, and I were suited up. We drove 1/4 mile away and deployed a
float with line and dove on that. The bottom was nearly a hundred meters away.
The water at 40 feet was clear except for transparent organisms every couple of
feet. Salps, our principal target, are colonial tunicates (pre vertebrate
chordates, sort of related to us). They were abundant. Also ctenophores, siphonophores,
and smaller bits. I captured as many as I carried jars for and 25 minutes into
my dive, I returned to the surface.where I couldn't get back into the Zodiac
without assistance. But when everyone else was done and returned to the
surface, Larry helped me unbuckle my BC and without that weight, I was able to
be helped aboard.
Among my captures in the ten or so jars I filled were salps, a
giant (4" long) ctenophore [common in Cape Cod waters, clear except for
lengthwise rows of tiny cilia that “glow” when stirred up in summer night
waters], and a siphonophore that looked to me like a wisp of smoke. I also
caught what I thought was a pair of milkweed pods but were actually a pair of
salps in a different life stage. It was really neat seeing and capturing all
these things. Pat, Kerri, and Brennan immediately went to work collecting fecal
material deposited by the salps in their jars since their capture. Nothing is
wasted. Pat studies how fast a salp processes the particles it captures on a
mucous net it produces and swallows.”
Salps are being processed and photographed and shared among other
interested parties before they fade, die and turn to wet Kleenex. We are
steaming now to our next benthic tow later this evening. It's been a
productive, pleasant day.
Dinner: Salmon with tomatoes and cilantro, beans with cilantro, rice and
something else, with cilantro on the side, and as always, salad. Cookies
for dessert.
Journal #4
November 26, 2004, Friday
Long/Lat: S054degrees 31.009 W062degrees 06.221
We continue to head due east, taking ocean samples on a
rotating schedule, about every 4 hours. So far, I’ve been on the sea
bottom trawl shifts for the most part, and get to sort with my hands instead of
with tweezers and pipettes, which is sometimes good, sometimes bad. That
slimy seastar image will be with me for a while.
Along the way, I’ll tell about the people on the cruise. I
find them all very nice, and as the days go on, I am learning their names and
their different and interesting backgrounds (how did we all wind up out here
together?). Nerida (pronounced “Nayr-da”) is from
On Thanksgiving I assisted in the photo lab while Larry
Madin, the jelly team leader, took pictures of salps in his nifty photography
tank setup. It is a small, narrow Plexiglas aquarium (14x16x3?) with a
black background and side lighting. I had to resist watching the surface
of the water in the tank as it shifted first left, then right with the roll of
the ship. The jellies didn’t seem to mind that, and with a little stirring
above the subject using a long pipette, it would spin and dance the most
delicate serpentine ballet. It is beautiful to see, and would
probably be well put to music. The dive group did go out late today, and
among other samples, brought back the most remarkable 7-inch ctenophore
(“tee-nuh-fore”, a blimp-shaped jelly)!! It was pinkish in color, and
showed vibrant colors flashing along its “seams” all the time we watched and
photographed it.
Today’s benthic trawl brought up fewer slimy stars, and many more
brittle stars with long curly legs. These are relatives of the “basket
star” from a previous photo posted, but their legs don’t get the little branches
like the basket star. See the photo of the larva of this same type of
critter [Image 1]. This came up in an earlier (today) plankton net, and
had its picture taken under microscope. Most of the adults are only the
size of the palm of your hand, but are quite strong when they coil their legs
around netting or a nearby piece of seaweed or each other!
We sorted the sample out on deck in bright sunshine with the
pleasant company of probably 200 seabirds. Most of these were petrels,
but now the black-browed albatross are making a large show in the
population. I don't know what they expect from us, our “throwback” is not
what they'd like for a meal, but they’re there nonetheless… perhaps just for
our entertainment?
We are still heading east right now, but will turn
back just under the Falkland Islands toward the west again to Staten Island,
and then go southeast toward Elephant Island, passing the tip of South America
to our right (do you have a map? We’re at the bottom of the continent!).
We will be in more open waters on that latter leg (the
Journal #5
November 27, 2004,
Saturday
(ed. note, Happy Birthday, Doc)
Long/Lat: S054degrees 26.740 W058degrees 42.752
My watch of
I’m sure the chief scientist would forgive us for making
light of what he might consider very important to the study, but might be happy
if we always remember what a zoea looks like. I will probably
never forget what a copepod looks like, though, because I think I saw half a
million of them!!
Our next operation was to drop the Smith-MacIntyre grab instrument
overboard to take about a cubic foot of material off the ocean bottom, look it
over, and see if a larger sampling would be worthwhile. The first time
down, a rock jammed the “jaws” open a bit, and too much of the sample leaked
out. A second drop brought back evidence of a good sampling area, so the
Blake Trawl was deployed (see the
It will be a productive night of something new and different
to process. It just never gets boring out here!!
Because it was a less hectic day, I had the opportunity to use the
“gym” area for the first time. It is a good-sized exercise room with a
rowing machine, treadmill, reclining bicycle, pole weights and a Universal
Gym. There’s a vcr/cd player in there, too, and I had some exercising
companions and good Australian music to keep the rhythm going. For having
done this, tomorrow I will likely need to use the Jacuzzi… I’ll tell you about
that later.
Journal #6
November 28, 2004, Sunday (midnight to 4am shift)
Long/Lat: S054degrees 36.924 W061degrees 07.111
Wind ~8knots, Air Temp 7degrees C, Depth 274meters
Dinner Menu Sunday: Sweet and sour pork, Chicken Cordon Bleu, peas,
zucchini
(Dinner Menu Saturday: Prime rib, bbq ribs both remarkably
good! 5 stars!!)
The weather is a bit cooler and rainy today, but not terribly
rough. Tows are being dropped according to schedule, and today we start
shooting off XBT’s. More on that later. We’re heading west again,
and will turn south when we’re just below Staten Island (Isla de los
Estados). We are in Argentine waters, and so the flag of Argentina is
highest on our mainmast. (Do you know whose flag flies highest when we
get close to Antarctica?)
Ship’s Personnel: Jamie is one of the Marine
Technician’s (MT’s) on LMG, and an able young woman she is! Jamie is most
evident on the main deck when equipment is being deployed over the side on the
big mechanical rig called the “A-frame”. MT’s wear walkie-talkies on
their shoulders, and talk to the Bridge (person at the helm of the ship) to
keep them informed of details of the equipment positioning process. Jamie
was once a commercial fisherman in Alaska, but interestingly enough, she is
from Nebraska (I think she just like places that end in “a”?). So you can
see, Jamie has come a long way to be crew on a ship to Antarctica
practically from one pole of the world to the other.
When Jamie communicates with the person running the hydraulics
(the lifting and lowering rig or A-frame) from a small control room in the
starboard mid-ship area, she uses hand signals rather than saying, “A little
up, a little down, now to the right,…”. Here are a few of those
signals: 1) Make a soft fist and point your pointer finger
up. Now make little circles with your finger. Voila!! You’ve
just told the person at the Controls to bring the wire up (it rolls onto a
giant spool). Point down and do the same thing, and the wire goes
down; 2) Now keep the fist, knuckles up, and then hold up your
thumb and pointer finger and put them apart and together like little pinchers,
and you’ve said, “up slowly, a little at a time”. You can figure, then,
how to say “down slowly”; 3) Make a fist, hold it up about
head-height and move it in and out and stop sharply - that means “Stop!”;
4) Last lesson: Hold your hand open, fingers pointing up and palm
forward, about head-height and without turning your wrist, ‘wave’
sideways. If you emphasize the direction away from you, you’ve told the
Control Room to move the A-frame out over the water. If you do the
reverse, the A-frame comes in. Now Jamie has to watch out for her job,
because you know what she knows! Anyway, I’m very impressed with
this woman and the responsibility her job holds.
The Catch of the Day goes to the Salps Lab group. On
their dive today, a beautiful pteropod was captured in one of their dive jars,
“eye candy” for all to see. A pteropod is a type of shell-less,
"winged" snail that lives in the water column (a free floatin’ dude,
neither at the top nor at the bottom of the ocean). This particular one
was about an inch in diameter, and of the warmest, most velvety maroon (or a
fine Chilean merlot) color! [See Image 2 - Brown Pteropod] Its
“wings” move in tiny, rhythmic S-curves to propel it through the water as it
feeds and mingles with the rest of the column community.
We are mostly doing plankton tows now, on a regular schedule of
every 4 hours. Our main assignment is to find certain larvae amidst the
masses of copepods. There are snails and clams and barnacles that to the
naked eye are just specks in the water. Our great challenge is to find
and catch the “oddball” treasures in the magnified fluid as it sloshes in and
out of the microscope’s lens range. Oh yeah. It’s fun for me to see
tiny, not-quite-microscopic squid larvae. As small as they are, they are still
quite recognizable with their large eyes, yet short baby tentacles with the
“suckers” already formed on them. Quite sweet, these guys. (Bring
me a cracker!)
Journal #7
November 29, 2004, Monday
Long/Lat: S056degrees 24.538 W061degrees 25.910
Our weather window has held out so far. Seas are about 4
feet, and the wind is in the low 20’s. Captain Mike (“The Buck Stops
Here”) Terminel reports he was watching a front coming our way that would
probably have kicked us around some (“oh yeah, we’ve had 40 foot seas with
steady 50 mph winds for 4 days!”). Good news is, it turned south instead
of staying east, and missed us. Thank you, King Neptune. We have
crossed the Burwood Bank and water depth has gone from a manageable (for benthic
tows) 101 meters on 26 Nov., to over 4200 meters today!
Plankton tows today are yielding photo- not zoo-, so we’re looking
for almost clear critters in stuff that looks like guacamole. Actually,
the Lab Czars have come up with a plan to run the green stuff through a sieve
system that clears it out quite a bit - only thing is, we haven’t found any
target critters in the last couple of tows. (Our greatest contribution
this afternoon was pair of salps for the lab across the hall.) I rather
enjoyed looking through the diatoms (what the green stuff is made of), because
they sort of shimmer, and are of very uniform size, like little pieces of
greenish-blue fiberglass. Sort of gets you in the Christmas spirit.
In an alternate pattern to plankton tows, a measuring device
called an XBT is being used to measure the temperature of the water through the
water column. Sandy Williams, a WHOI scientist/engineer, explains how
this works, and has provided a chart that shows what the instrument is telling
us via a colorful array [See Image 1 XBT]:
“The expendable bathythermograph or XBT is a probe that looks like a
small (about 3 inch by 16 inch) fireworks pipe used for taking the temperature
of the ocean. It not only measures the temperature of the water at the surface
but takes the temperature all the way down to 800 meters or more by falling
through the water while spinning out a two-conductor wire and sending the
signal from its thermistor back to the ship. The ship is still steaming
at 10 knots so it too needs to spin out a wire to the place where the XBT fell
into the water. So there are actually two coils of very fine wire in an XBT,
one in the probe and the other in the launcher on the ship. Eventually one or
the other spool is emptied and the wire breaks, ending the profile. In the
illustration, three profiles, at 57.3, 57.4, and 57.5 degrees south failed at
630 meters because the ship was going fast and the launcher wire ran out first.
A section of profiles is useful to know when the ship has crossed a front and
can expect to find different animals in the water. In this illustration, a
profile was made every tenth degree of latitude and a computer program
contoured these measurements and colored them. This section is arranged as
though you are looking from the Atlantic into the Pacific with Antarctica to
the left. Warm water to the right is less dense and floats slightly higher than
the colder water to the left of the front. This makes the water on the right
try to run down hill to the south but the rotation of the earth in the southern
hemisphere causes this southward flow to turn left and the warm water flows
east relative to the cold water. From the section you can also see that the
coldest water, less than 0 degrees Celsius, is not at the surface but at 120
meters depth. The minimum temperature is -0.98 degrees which is below the
freezing point of fresh water but this is salt water with a freezing point of
-1.8 degrees. It is dense because of its temperature and would be expected to
sink except that it must be less salty than the water beneath it. This is late
spring in Antarctica and some ice melt could have freshened the cold water
slightly to produce this cold core of water south of the Antarctic Polar
Front.”
Catch of the Day: A lobate (lobed) ctenophore was captured by the
dive group, on what will probably be the last dive for a couple of days.
It is extraordinary in that it looks like a more common ctenophore, but has
what look like football player's shoulder pads on one end. Scientist
Larry Madin says that it has not been described officially for science before
(written up in a journal and named), so it remains nameless as an individual
species. Anyone care to suggest a name for this jelly? I thought
“Bubba” would be fitting, but I think more serious people would like a more
scientific, Latin-sounding name.
Speaking of pet names, Adriene has adopted a squid critter from
one of the benthic tows, whom she proudly introduces as “Chile”.
Technically, there are no pets allowed on ship, but it’s ok if they’re in a
jar. …and Chile doesn’t eat much. (We’re having a hard time
breaking the news to Adriene that Chile is not really moving or breathing much,
either. Sometimes “denial” is a beautiful thing.)
Tomorrow we finish the Drake Passage and look forward to Elephant
Island!
Dinner: Gravy Gumbo, Fish w/salsa, rice, zucchini, cupcakes with red and
green frosting!