Ross Sea Connection

Dr. Adam Kustka has been wearing the same gray-and-black windbreaker for about two weeks. He doesn’t appear to sleep at all except for short naps, which consist of pulling his hood up and putting his head down on his desk in front of his computer monitor. His hands remain over the keyboard so that when […]

The Palmer has an ample supply of Dutch hot chocolate mix to warm people as they come in from the wind, spray, and snow on deck. Today I fixed my cup as normal, but I walked away from the galley without a spoon. As I sloshed and swirled my cup, hoping the hot chocolate powder […]

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 […]

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 […]

After three days of overcast skies and whitecaps, today the wind settled and the sky cleared. Sun warmed the observation deck on the bow, and stiff-winged snow petrels flittered among the waves as if impatient for the wind to return. We had steamed south about 120 miles to get some more information from an interesting […]

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 […]

Adam Kustka talks about the different phytoplankton he expects to find in the Ross Sea and why they are important.