Ross Sea Connection

Follow the CTD over the side of the Palmer and into the Ross Sea on a short cast. Look for Niskin bottles closing at 24 and 32 seconds in the video.

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 […]

The science team samples Ross Sea water from the Niskin bottles.

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 […]

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 […]