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 […]

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 […]

We love getting questions from people reading along on our blog or in classrooms. Yesterday we heard from Shiquan at Monument School, who asked why iron makes plants grow. That’s a great question that gets right to the heart of biological oceanography, so let’s take a day and explore the answer. If you remember from […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]