Ross Sea Connection

How do you stay close from half a world away? Long absences are a part of oceanography, and months away from home are something that all sailors cope with. In centuries past, sailors left home for two, three, or more years at a time, often not knowing when they would come home and communicating only […]

Far up in the bow of the Palmer, past the cold rooms, beyond the dry labs, and five stories below the bridge, two people are at work in a gleaming steel room. They mix compounds in metal bowls, sprinkle in precisely measured powders, and then arrange their mixtures on trays to put into calibrated heating […]

It’s 7 a.m. and I’m just sitting down to write about yesterday. I can scarcely remember the emergency glider recovery that Dr. Josh Kohut and Eli Hunter put into motion at 2:30 a.m. yesterday morning. Then the clouds descended and the wind picked up, and the chief mate closed the decks, keeping us all inside […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Palmer spent most of today on the move. We steamed 180 miles northeast of Ross Island to recover a glider for Dr. Walker Smith of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. Then we turned toward Station 16 (see Jan 28 post), about 120 miles to our northwest. Along the way we are sampling the […]

At 5 a.m. we came to a stop at the sea-ice edge about 10 miles north of McMurdo Station. A single emperor penguin was asleep about a quarter-mile away, its head tucked snugly out of sight. In the patch of open water our ship had created, a minke whale surfaced. Underneath the ice plain before […]

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 […]