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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

This morning was Feb. 2 for us–Groundhog Day. I looked out the window but saw no groundhogs. I didn’t even see any ground. The really odd part was that in the afternoon we crossed the International Dateline and the date turned back to February 1st. That means that when I wake up tomorrow morning, it’s […]

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 […]