Ross Sea Connection

We love getting questions from people reading along on our blog or in classrooms. Yesterday we heard from Shiquan at Monument School, who asked why iron makes plants grow. That’s a great question that gets right to the heart of biological oceanography, so let’s take a day and explore the answer. If you remember from […]

Today’s story starts yesterday evening, and it features valuable items lost at the bottom of the sea, a midnight rescue plan sketched out on a napkin, a grappling hook as tall as a person, and a creature that looks like a space flower. We had come to Cape Adare to help Bruce Huber of Lamont-Doherty […]

We heard that in New Jersey it’s been snowy and very cold. So be proud! You’re in a place that’s colder than Antarctica right now. After four days of work in the waters of the central Ross Sea, the Palmer headed northwest toward the opening of the Southern Ocean. The northernmost end is called Cape […]

Today I toured around the work stations of each of the scientists studying Modified Circumpolar Deep Water: Drs. Josh Kohut, Chris Measures, Phoebe Lam, Angelicque White, Allen Milligan, and Adam Kustka. They’re all here because they have a hypothesis about how MCDW contributes to the summer blooms of phytoplankton that provide so much food to […]

We’ve talked a lot about Modified Circumpolar Deep Water recently. It’s the water that our gliders are looking for, and our scientists think the nutrients it carries cause the great blooms of food during the Ross Sea’s summers. Let’s take a day to get to know it. MCDW starts out in water 400 meters (1320 […]

In walkie-talkie etiquette, you call to the person you want to talk to, then identify yourself. So when ‘Glider Base, this is Zodiac’ comes over the radio, it means that someone in a little inflatable rubber boat (called a zodiac) wants to talk to the person who is running the gliders. Six of us were […]

Last night, Captain Yousri Maghrabi steered the Palmer toward Station A, at 76.5 degrees south, 170 degrees east. It’s just a patch of open water about 40 miles northeast of Ross Island, but oceanographers have been measuring water here since the mid-1990s. When we got there, the only land left visible were Ross and Beaufort […]

This evening at 6 p.m., the Palmer cast off its lines, weighed anchor, started its great engines rumbling, and set off through the pack ice. After a few safety briefings, everyone flooded out onto the decks for a display of sea ice and wildlife like nothing I have seen before. The temperature was about 30 […]

Yesterday we didn’t sleep much. We boarded our plane to Antarctica at 10 p.m., and by 4:20 in the morning we were standing on a carpet of sea ice. The sun was warm on my face, the sky was a spotless blue, and not many people needed their Big Red parkas. The temperature rose to […]

It’s January 17th, and we’re in Christchurch, New Zealand—about as far south of the equator as Rutgers is north of it. If you were holding a globe in your hands and looking at New Jersey, Christchurch would be all the way around the other side, near your pinky fingers. All that you’ve learned about the […]