Ross Sea Connection

Watch chief scientist Josh Kohut welcome you to our Ross Sea Connection cruise, speaking from above the ice pier at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, Jan 19, 2011.

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 […]

Scientists set up their equipment in the main lab of the Palmer before getting underway. This time lapse video shows a 360 degree view of the main lab over 37 minutes.

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 […]

We are now halfway through this important transect across the Ross Shelf.   The glider is telling us about the conditions and how they change as we move from one bank to the next.   In the map below you can see the location of the glider indicated by the red dot and the start of this […]

It has been almost 19 days since we deployed ru26D from the edge of the ice. In that time the glider has traveled over 436 km (271 miles).   On December 18 we reached station E of the AEZOPS line and turned east.  AEZOPS is a series of stations that have been sampled on previous experiments.  […]

We are one week into our glider mission in the Ross Sea and the glider is doing great!  Since the deployment and our adventure under the ice, the glider has gone over 150 km (93 miles) toward the NE.   The conditions in the open water of the Ross Sea Polynya have been great. The above […]

Minutes after the glider was deployed we encountered our first challenge.  We knew that the ice conditions would determine where we could deploy and that the conditions might not be ideal.  Well we did have ideal conditions for the deployment, nice weather, calm seas, and immediate access to open water.  The only downside to this […]

In early December, 2010, Chip Haldeman from Rutgers University and Clayton Jones from Teledyne Webb Research voyaged to the edge of the Antarctica to deploy an underwater glider. These are a few of the images from their journey.