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 […]

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 […]

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 […]