COSEE NOW

Thanks everyone! We’ll miss the Ross Sea, too. John and Alex, it was great to get back from this trip and see my family again, and also eat some fresh vegetables, as we ran out of those on the ship about three weeks ago! As far as I know, none of my friends have completely [...]

Hi Owen. Chris has a long pole that he attaches his camera to when he takes those shots. He puts his camera on auto-fire mode so it takes a shot every second, and he just sees what he gets when it comes back up. There are recreational scuba divers aboard, but I don’t think it’s [...]

Hi Skylar, in heavy weather the captain issues the command to ‘secure all weather decks’ which means we can’t go out on them. That’s to keep people from getting swept overboard. When the weather’s not quite so bad it’s still possible to get wet when a wave hits the ship just right. Elizabeth Halliday and [...]

Hi Zachary, It took about 20 minutes to film this 100-second video.

Hi Zachary, Yes, you’re right. The pipes are color coded to indicate what’s inside of them. That makes tracing and fixing leaks a lot easier. There’s a description of what’s inside every different color pipe at the beginning of this post.

Hi Sophie, we’ve got a little footage of the bow in heavy seas in the post we’re putting up today/tomorrow. We wanted to get the ‘stumblecam’ working, but while we were really rolling people had other things on their minds.

Hi Ms. Dunbar. The engine room is near the center of the ship and below the waterline, so its movement is about the quietest of anywhere on the ship. But it still moves. When I was down there it was more a smooth up and down, but I know it gets harder and choppier at [...]

Hi Sophie, the cooks work on 12-hour shifts, so while Ale is cooking breakfast and lunch, Dave is sleeping.

Hi again, Tim Tams are a kind of New Zealand cookie. They’re a little like oblong Oreos, but chocolate covered with chocolate center. I think the marine techs have a special technique for using them like straws.

Hi Zachary, I have definitely become nocturnal. Or at least as nocturnal as you can be in 24-hour daylight. I get up around noon and go to bed sometime between 5 and 9 a.m. I wouldn’t say it’s ‘because’ of midrats, but I’m very glad that they have midrats or I would only get one [...]

Hi Erin, that’s a good question that actually has a pretty simple answer: we just use a net with very small holes in it. The one that we used to catch plankton has holes that are about a fifth of a millimeter wide in it. It looks more like thick fabric than the kind of [...]

Dear Abby, Thanks for asking. People are getting tired and most of us miss our routines at home (as well as our loved ones). Read a bit more about this in the Feb. 14 post.

Hi Nick, Good question—Dr. Angelicque White and other scientists on this expedition do sometimes study harmful organisms in the water. But as far as they know, they have not found any harmful bacteria (or other organisms) in the water samples they’ve collected.

Hi Matt, great question. MCDW does occur outside of where we studied it, but only in a limited area around Antarctica. There have been other studies of MCDW in the past and there probably will continue to be.

Hi DRyder, we saw lots of seals, but mainly around the sea ice near McMurdo and not out in the open ocean. This expedition wasn’t designed to measure animal populations, and there’s lots of variability from year to year and species to species, so I can’t answer that question. People do study penguins with a [...]

Hi Olivia, that other scientist was Bruce Huber. He’s been studying deep currents in Antarctica since about 1978. He says it’s important to study deep ocean currents because they’re part of a global system of currents that has a major effect on how warm or cold different parts of the world are. The very cold [...]

Dear Liz, the glider can stay underwater for a very long time, but it’s typically programmed to surface every few hours so it can contact a satellite to figure out where it is and where it needs to go next, as well as send a data report back to the scientists at Rutgers. Inside the [...]

Hi Brendan. Dr. Josh Kohut and Eli Hunter have done a preliminary inspection on the glider, but they need to get it back to New Jersey before they can be sure. They suspect it’s a gasket near the ballast pump that wore out due to normal wear and tear.

Hi again. We’ve been curious to find that out. I think it’s mainly small krill that they catch by dipping their head into the water when they find a patch of the creatures. But just yesterday Chris and I saw a couple of snow petrels catch something long, white, and skinny and hold it crossways [...]