Ross Sea Connection

I woke up this morning to strange voices shouting. I was disoriented. Part of me felt like I was still on the bridge watching the Palmer wedge itself between ice floes, which is what I had been doing at 5 a.m. The ship was quiet then, though it shuddered and weaved among ice floes 12 […]

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 […]

We spent all day today just outside McMurdo Station, docked to a tanker and refueling. Most of the scientists relaxed, or talked about what they hoped to find in their next sampling stations, or sneaked into the galley to see when the cook brought out warm cookies. (For the record, it was about 8 p.m.) […]

Clouds form and dissipate, snow falls, and the sun emerges in this time lapse video shot during the transit from the central Ross Sea to the entrance of the McMurdo ice channel. At the end of the video, Beaufort Island, Cape Bird, and Mount Erebus come into view in that order. It represents 13.5 hours of real time.

This evening at 6 p.m., the Palmer cast off its lines, weighed anchor, started its great engines rumbling, and set off through the pack ice. After a few safety briefings, everyone flooded out onto the decks for a display of sea ice and wildlife like nothing I have seen before. The temperature was about 30 […]

Yesterday we didn’t sleep much. We boarded our plane to Antarctica at 10 p.m., and by 4:20 in the morning we were standing on a carpet of sea ice. The sun was warm on my face, the sky was a spotless blue, and not many people needed their Big Red parkas. The temperature rose to […]

The following collection of datasets can be used in Google Earth to explore the Antarctic Ocean environment before and during the cruise. Real-time datasets provide students an opportunity to gather scientific evidence, which they can use to investigate scientific processes that occur in the ocean.