Ross Sea Connection

Almost all the scientific work today was canceled as 40-knot winds buffeted the Palmer and seas pitched the ship forward and back. Not good weather for dangling a 750-pound, $100,000 instrument like a CTD rosette over the side. On land, bad weather can disrupt a science plan, but only in the ocean can the very […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]