Ship arrival

The Palmer steaming into port

The vessel that will be our home for the next two months, the RVIB (Research Vessel Ice Breaker) Nathaniel B. Palmer, came in to McMurdo Sound at about 8:00 am to a beautiful view of the snowy mountains in the background and flattened pancake like sea ice amidst a half melted harbor. The ship broke through some leftover fragments of ice and came to dock at the ice pier.  It is a magnificent ship, chartered by NSF, driven and maintained by Edison-Chouest Offshore, and science support given by Raytheon Polar Services Corporation, the same group that provides support for the United States Antarctic Program.  We had to wait approximately 24 hours once the Palmer was secured on the pier for the previous team to have all of their gear unloaded and for the ship to be fully fueled (about 10,000 gallons, enough to last us the 68 days planned at sea), before we were allowed to board, load, and setup our own gear.  The previous cruise had been out for about a month doing the some the same research only in different locations; and several members will re-board and join us along for our cruise as well making their cruise about 3 months with a couple of days stop in McMurdo.

Forward starboard view of the Palmer on the ice pier with McMurdo in the background

The ship is a large one, at 308 ft overall length and 60 ft breadth with 4 decks above the main deck and a large overhanging bridge from which to view the ice.  My stateroom is on the 02 deck in just about the center of the ship.  Myself, two other Physical Oceanography students, and a teacher joining us from Madison, Wisconsin to blog about the voyage to his students, are sharing the only 4 person stateroom on the ship, all the rest are 2 person.  We do have more floor room, but of course less storage and we have to deal with 4 of us (not bad at all, they are all very nice people; I'm the only unpleasant one!).  Everyone else's stateroom (of the science crew anyway) is on the 01 deck, except for the Chief Scientist Jim Swift from Scripps Oceanographic Institute in San Diego, and the Co-Chief Scientist Alejandro Orsi from Texas A&M University, who are both on the 03 deck.  The remaining ship's crew are all on the 02 deck and above.  We mostly will work from the main deck except for some of the trace metal group who will be working from the Helo deck (deck for a helicopter) in a garage like enclosed room.  On the main deck there are several labs.  Two wetlabs are aft (towards the rear), and are next to the Marine Technician's workshop.  There are three dry labs, one aft on the starboard side (the main lab for chemistry), one aft on the port side (more chemistry), and one forward (the main one for data processing and CTD control; lots of computers) on the starboard side.  On the port side across from the command control lab, is a computer lab.  Forward of all the labs are the mess hall and the galley (kitchen).  In between the wet labs and the dry labs on the starboard side is a room they call the "Baltic Room".  This is considered a deck even though it is a room, since it has a giant hydraulic door that opens up with a hydraulic extending boom that sticks out to deploy our CTD package (see intro post).  This room and the CTD command room, is where I will spend most of my time.

My stateroom.  I'm in the bunk on the lower right.  All of the other staterooms are two person, but we students are the greenhorns and must pay our dues.  The TV shows camera angles from all parts of the boat including heading information

The Baltic Room with huge hydraulic door to deploy the CTD, retrieve it, and sample within this room.  This room will be my second home.

Ice on the deck 2 levels above the main deck

The Galley

Once we began loading, we remained busy for two days.  First, all of the cargo vans (large cargo containers) had to be placed by crane on the deck, then opened and all of the contents moved inside the ship.  This took the majority of the first day.  Next while the cargo vans were being placed below decks in the cargo hold, we had to shuffle containers to near their respective setup locations, then unpack everything, and reshuffle empty boxes away and bring in new ones to be unpacked.  Then each respective station setup their equipment which of course has to be secured by screws, rope, bungee, ratchet straps, or whatever means necessary since each piece of equipment is usually at least several thousand dollars worth of equipment, and often tens of thousands or more.  Most equipment then needs to be calibrated, adjusted, initialized, checked, etc. as often multi-thousand dollar equipment requires.  Things like chemicals need to be placed properly and secured as well.  While inherently, climate and ocean water masses and their changes through time are physical phenomena, the majority of measurements on board are of a chemical nature and maintained by chemical oceanographers.  This meant that a large portion of the containers were chemical reagents of some kind which usually require special treatment.  I will explain more in detail later, but the chemical properties we are studying are CFC's (as in the banned in the 90's aerosol product), Helium, Oxygen, pH, Alkalinity, Dissolved Inorganic Carbon (DIC), Carbon 14 isotope (C14), Dissolved Organic Carbon (DOC), Nutrients, Salinity, Trace Metals, Tritium, Oxygen 18 isotope (O18), Colored Dissolved Organic Matter (CDOM), Pigments, and probably some others that I am forgetting.  So you see there is a lot of chemistry that goes on here, so it took a long time to get all of it setup.  As I know very little about the measurement and analysis of most of the chemical processes, and much less about their setup, I was resigned to do the container shuffling and stowing down in the cargo hold.

The main lab.  Lots of chemical analysis is done here.

The computer lab.  Texas A&M's Dr. Alejandro Orsi at the computer

The Science Command Console.  CTD information will be broadcast on these screens for me to watch.  This will be home number one for me.

The night of the first day of loading, we got to sleep on the boat.  Oh it was so much better than staying in the room we called "man camp" in the McMurdo dorms.  It was nice to be making some headway towards our goal by that point.  There were some setbacks though.  First, some containers labeled "Do Not Freeze" ended up being frozen, and many chemicals fell below freezing, and may cause some unwanted affects.  There were also some sensitive instruments also in the frozen Do Not Freeze package, some drifting sensors that did not respond when tested, and their deployment was canceled altogether, essentially wasting a good bit of money.  And then we had expected to be able to be loaded and setting up as the boat was fueled in McMurdo, but instead we were made to wait while being fueled (half a day) and load after.  This has pushed our leaving date back a day.  On a better note though, as we were loading up over the two days, we were visited by Adelie penguins that had come to see us off from the bank just opposite the ice pier. 

Adelie Penguin to show us off

View into the sound from the ice pier, ice has melted much more than my first day there

The Palmer's starboard while moored to the ice pier