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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

See exactly what the glider sees during this video montage from a glider test dive. In the first part of the video, the glider is launched from the zodiac, then it travels to a depth of three meters, and finally surfaces. As the glider prepares to surface you can hear the sound of the pump changing the buoyancy.