Ross Sea Connection

Large waves wash along the starboard (right) side of the ship during a storm.

We’ve been on the Palmer for 20 days, we’ve been to 49 sampling stations, taken thousands of water samples, flown three separate gliders, and started dozens of incubations. So, have we learned anything? It’s not a rude question—for decades oceanographers have been mostly unable to look at the results of their work until after they […]

Things never go right all the time on an expedition. It started with heavy snow on Saturday morning. Visibility dwindled and the wind built snowdrifts on the upper decks. Then Dr. Chris Measures’s trace-metal CTD rosette (see Jan. 26 post) stopped collecting water. And, as you read yesterday, glider RU26 came home early with what […]

Late yesterday evening we recovered glider RU26, which had been cruising the waters of the Ross Sea since December 11. After 55 days, RU26 had traveled 732 miles, made 2,187 dives, and come within 2 miles of crossing the International Dateline and becoming a Golden Dragon like the rest of us (see yesterday’s post). But […]

Yesterday I got an e-mail entitled ‘ATTENTION ALL SCOUNDRELS AND POLLYWOGS.’ As I read it, I realized I was being summoned before King Neptune’s Court. I had never crossed the International Dateline before this trip, and so in the eyes of Neptune I was a pollywog—an insignificant landlubber with no business being at sea. I […]

It was the color of the ocean from space that brought us here. We knew it was a gamble, a dogleg away from our main sampling plan. But satellites were telling us that phytoplankton were flourishing here, over deep water, where no one could explain it and no one had ever been to study it […]

This morning was Feb. 2 for us–Groundhog Day. I looked out the window but saw no groundhogs. I didn’t even see any ground. The really odd part was that in the afternoon we crossed the International Dateline and the date turned back to February 1st. That means that when I wake up tomorrow morning, it’s […]

Antarctica is renowned for having some of the fiercest weather on Earth. At any time of year, torrents of cold air can stream off the Antarctic continent and create vicious gales on the sea. So far we’ve been lucky to have calm seas and winds—especially on our visit to notoriously wind-whipped Cape Adare (see Jan […]